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ADDRESSES 



AT THE INAUGTJKATION OF 



COBNELIUS CONWAY EEL1M, LLD V 



PRESIDENT OF HARVARD COLLEGE, 



THE FESTIVAL OF THE ALUMNI, 



THURSDAY, JULY 19, 1860. 




CAMBRIDGE: 
SEVER AND FRANCIS, 

BOOKSKI-LKKS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 

1860. 



Entered aooordlng to Act of Congress, In the year I860, by 

s i' \ i R AND FRANCIS, 

in the Clerk's Office >>t the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



University Press, Cambridge : 
Printed bj Welch, Bigelow, and Company. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



The Rev. James Walker, l>. I), having sent his resigna- 
tion of the Presidency of Harvard College to the Corpora- 
tion, to take effect at the close of the first term of the 
Academical year 1859 — 60, the Corporation elected, on the 
26th of January, 1860, Professor Cornelius Conway Fel- 
ton, LL. D., as his successor, and this appointment was 
unanimously confirmed hy the Board of Overseers on the 
10th of February. 

On the 31st of March, a committee of the Corporation, 
consisting of John A. Lowell, Esq. and Amos A. Lawrence, 
Esq., was appointed to prepare for the inauguration of the 
new President. The Faculty of the College, having been 
requested to co-operate with the Corporation, nominated, 
as a committee for this purpose, Professor Joseph Lovering, 
Professor F. J. Child, and Professor G. M. Lane. 

It was finally arranged that the public inauguration 
should take place on Thursday, the 19th day of. Inly, being 
the day of the Triennial Festival of the Alumni, who wen- 
invited hy the Corporation to unite their celebration with 
the ceremonies of inauguration. The inauguration of I 'res- 
ident Wadsworth, in 1725, was on Commencement Day. 

Notwithstanding the heavy showers of the morning, the 
members of the Government of the University, the Asso- 
ciation of the Alumni, and the invited guests, assembled in 
great numbers in Gore Hall, under the twofold attraction of 
the occasion, and at llf o'clock the procession was formed, 



by the direction of the Chief Marshal, Henry Lee, Jr., Esq., 
and moved in the following order : — 

OEDEE OF PEOCESSION FEOM GOEE HALL. 

Music by Boston Brigade Band. 

Aid. Chief Marshal. Aid. 

Undergraduates of the College. 

Members of the Scientific and Professional Schools. 

The Association of the Alumni. 

Librarian, with the College Seal and Charter. 

Steward, with the College Keys. 

Members of the Corporation. 

Professors and all other Officers of Instruction and Government 

in the University. 

Ex-Presidents Quincy, Everett, Sparks, and Walker. 

Former Members of the Corporation. 

Ex-Professors of the College. 

Sheriffs of Suffolk and Middlesex. 

President of the Association of the Alumni, and Orator 

of the Day. 

Orator of the Undergraduates, and Chaplains. 

His Excellency the Governor, and the President Elect. 

Governor's Aids. 

His Honor the Lieutenant-Governor, and the Adjutant-General. 

The Honorable the Executive Council. 

The Honorable and Eeverend Overseers. 

Gentlemen specially invited. 

Presidents of other Colleges. 

Judges of the State and United States Courts. 

The President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the 

House of Representatives. 

Auditor, Treasurer, and Secretary of the Commonwealth. 

Mayors of Boston and Cambridge. 



After passing in front of University Hall, Holworthy Hall, 
Stonghton Hall, Hollis Hall, and Harvard Hall, the proces- 
sion entered the First Parish Church at twelve o'clock ; the 
galleries of which were already crowded with ladies. 



ORDER OF EXERCISES IN THE CHURCH. 

I. MUSIC BY THE BAND. 
II. LUTHER'S HYMN, 

BY THE CHOIR. 

III. PRAYER, 

BY THE REV. PRESIDENT STEARNS, OF AMHERST COLLEGE. 

IV. ORATION IN LATIN, 

BY JOSEPH II. McDANIELS, OF THE SENIOR CLASS. 

V. ADDRESS AND INDUCTION INTO OFFICE, 

BY HIS EXCELLENCY GOVERNOR BANKS. 

VI. REPLY, 

BY PRESIDENT FELTON. 

VII. DOMINE SALVUM FAC PRAESIDEM ! 

BY THE CHOIR. 

VIII. ALUMNI ORATION, 

BY THE REV. DR. SAMUEL OSGOOD. 

IX. MUSIC BY THE BAND. 
X. INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 

BY PRESIDENT FELTON. 

XI. PRAYER, 
BY THE REV. PROFESSOR A. P. PEABODY. 

XII. TE DEUM. 
XIII. BENEDICTION, 

BY THE EX-PRESIDENT, THE REV. DR. WALKER. 



6 

The presence upon the stage of four ex-Presidents of 
Harvard College — the Hon. Josiah Quincy, the Hon. Ed- 
ward Everett, the Hon. Jared Sparks, and the Rev. Dr. 
James Walker — was the most extraordinary incident of 
the day. The vacant chair reserved for the oldest of this 
distinguished band was scarcely less eloquent during the 
early part of the services than the appearance of his venera- 
ble form at the private door of the pulpit while President 
Felton was delivering his Inaugural Address. While he 
was conducted to his seat, at the head of the column of 
living ex-Presidents, the whole audience rose involuntarily 
to express their emotion, and the felicitous turn which 
the speaker gave to his discourse made the event a most 
happy interruption in the programme. 

At the conclusion of the services in the church, the 
Alumni of the College, the Government of the University, 
and the invited guests assembled again in Gore Hall, and 
marched in procession to Harvard Hall, where a dinner 
had been provided under the direction of the committee 
of the Association of the Alumni. 

For the Committee, 

JOSEPH LOVERING. 
Cambridge, September, 1860. 



LATIN ORATION, 



JOSEPH H. McDANIELS, 



SENIOR CLASS. 



O R A T I O .* 



Vixdum silent voces quas modo hi parietes redde- 
bant, quum hodie aliis vocibus aliaque causa iterum 
resonant. Adolescentes et senes, non modo nos qui 
in hoc loco quasi in regno sapientiae mansuri sum us, 
et ii qui heri in regnum amplius et per omnes terras 
patens ex his finibus transierunt, sed ctiam qui mul- 
tos ante annos hinc discesserunt, omnes, quasi cives 
aut legati, convocamur, ut novum regem in civitatc 
constituamus, ut de illo nobis gratulemur, ut festum 
diem aganius. 

Juvenes, qui modo socii nostri in his studiis fue- 
runt, laete hie laetos videmus atque optimis omini- 
bus proscquimur. Quam praescriptioncm edictis suis 
Romani soliti sunt praescribcrc, "Quod bonum, fau- 
stum felixque sit," vitae eorum praescribimus, et 
spem habemus hunc diem iis omnia prospera ac for- 
tunata portendere. 

Sed seniores praecipuo gaudio afficiuntur. Nam 
hodie, triennio intcrjecto, de more hue convenerunt 
ut notas sedes amicosque notos revisant, ut inter so 

* On account of the illness of the orator, the Oration was read by his 
classmate, William Franklin Snow. 

2 



10 

colloquantur, et temporis praeteriti familiaritatem 
renoveut. Recordantur parvum incertumque liujus 
collegii principium, ut in loca deserta, in solum non 
modo alienum sed etiam inimicum translatum et 
quasi talca tenera satum sit ; ut floruerit tamquam 
ulmi quibus ingentissimis circumdetur ; ut umbram 
viris fortissimis praebuerit, qui, quum belli civilis 
procellis quateretur, libenter ei subvenerint ; ut, de- 
nique, bello ac procellis superstes nunc per dimidium 
orbis terrarum ramos longe lateque exteiidat. Quum 
suos quondam socios, quum sanctae tlieologiae doc- 
tores, quum oratores et juclices, quum civitatis priu- 
cipes et senatores, qui pictate aut eloquentia aut 
sapientia illustrissimi sunt, quum hos omnes ex re- 
gionibus diversissimis ejusdem matris alumnos vidcnt, 
verba Anchisae dicta de Roma aptissima in mentem 
veniunt, — 

" Auspiciis ilia inclyta 
Imperium ten-is, animos acquabit Olympo, 
Felix prole varum." 

Ergo pro liac matre felice prolem benigne ex- 
cipimus. 

Sed non solum quos hie oculis nostris aspicimus 
digni sunt quorum mentionem faciamus. Mihi qui- 
dem, longa in banc aedem pompa perducta, cum ea 
se conjungere visae sunt animae priscorum virorum 
qui hos ducentos annos ex hoc fonte aquas doctrinac 
hauserunt : — 

" Quique sacerdotes casti dum vita ruancbat, 
Quique pii vates et Pboebo digna locuti, 
Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, 
Quique sui memores alios fecere uierendo ; " 



11 

horum umbrae silcntes volitant circum sedes quae iis 
in vita gratae erant, et animis faventibus nos dcspi- 
ciunt. 

Quanti autem civitas et cives res hujus collegii 
faciant, civitatis princeps praescntia sua et hie conven- 
tus frequentissimus virorum et matrum et virginum 
satis ostendunt. Decet Rempublicam humanitatis 
cultum honorare per quern sapientes ad res admi- 
nistrandas exercentur ; decet matronas et sorores hie 
adesse ubi filii et fratres spes carum tutissima ver- 
santur. 

De iis qui hue uno animo eoque laetissimo congre- 
gati sunt hoc tantum locuti, restat ut de illo cujus 
causa est congrcgatio pauca dicamus. Ingrati au- 
tem et nobis indigni essemus, si, quum nobis de novo 
praeside gratularemur, eum qui tot annos tanto stu- 
dio ad universitatem augendam tantos labores per- 
tulit, omitteremus. Praeclarus et fortunatus ille dies 
quo nostris rebus praefectus est, et nunc quum triste 
verbum " Vale " dicimus, ne laetissimis quidern tem- 
poribus integrum gaudium esse humanarum rerum 
intelligimus. 

Utinam mihi liceat ut lingua Latina sic etiam 
moribus Latinorum in dicendo uti. Principi enim 
oratorum illorum de se ipso dicenti narrare quae 
egregie fecerat nulla erat religio ; nobis de aliis di- 
centibus quae vera, quae laude digna, quae ex animo 
sentimus, non parte ejusdem libertatis uti liceat ] 

Ego vero quum haec omnia unius opera florere 
video, non possum quin illius operam admirer et illi 
gratias agam. 



12 

lit (1c iis primum dicam quae oculis percipimus, in 
partibus diversis aedificia solida et grandia intra col- 
legii muros posita sunt. llinc thesaurus quidam 
rerum aspectu dignarum aut quae in terris rcpositae 
sunt aut quae hominum artibus inventae ; illinc ex 
leerato civis liberalissimi aedes sancta et tota Deo 
dedicata est educta. Porro autem et extra muros 
aedificium minus et humilius est modo cxtructum, 
cuius minime decet nos oblivisci, Nimium enim ad 
nos convenientia verba Horatii, adhuc fuerunt. 

Apricum oderamus campum, timebamus flavum 
Tiberim tangere, nee certe exercendo livida brachia 
gestabamus. Nunc autem quantum liacc mutata ! 
Quae in nostro Tiberi praeclare et egregie facta, quis 
non audivit 1 ? In his rebus profecto llomanos et 
Graecos superamus. Romania enim fuerunt Cam- 
pus et Tiberis, Graeeis gymnasia in quibus corporis 
exercitationibus sunt assuefacti. Nobis autem non 
desunt et campus et Tiberis atque gymnasium. 

Ad mentes exercendas non minores sunt facilitates 
datae. Homo pius et philosophiam eolcns universi- 
tati praeerat, in quo consilium imperiti, opem inopes 
invenerunt. Summae is in dicendo gravitatis, sum- 
mae in imperando prudentiae l'uit. Quanto studio ex 
ejus labris verba sapientiae plena et vitae praecepta 
beatae audivimus ! Quantam artem et peritiam in 
rebus difficillimis agendis praestitit ! 

Quid igiturl Dignusne est quisquam qui viro 
tantis virtutibus praedito succedat i Quis nisi tu, 
cuius nomen multos annos cum hoc collegio conjunc- 
tum est, qui nunc singulari quadam fortuna neces- 



13 

sitatibus adfuisti? Ad hunc locum acccdis neque 
patriae hominumqwr gentibufl neque nobis praesenti- 
bus ignotus. Eruditionem illam, quam investigationc 
diligcntissima consccutus es, nunquam passus es inu- 
tilcm esse. Sod alterum multoque majus bcncficium 
in civcs tuos ct in omncs homines contulisti. In 
alienis civitatibus peregrinatus, cum viris illustrissi- 
mis et doctissimis collocutus, ad fontcm ipsum phi- 
losopbiac, ad illam Graeciam quondam liberam ct 
celebcrrimam pervenisti. Vetcrum Graecorum poeta- 
rum et oratorum et pbilosopliorum semper amantis- 
sinms facile adductus es ut Graecos hujus aetatis 
diligeres, quos plurimos annos a tyrannis oppressos, 
ut vix quidcm cos cognoscercmus esse, tu scriptis 
tuis per nostram rempublicam dccoravisti. Reddi- 
disti nobis gentcm antiquam nobilemque quae diu 
prostrata jacuit, quae modo surrexit et sibi libertatem 
vindicavit, de littcris eorum florentibus et civitate 
nunc firmata nos docuisti. Quare seu doctrinam seu 
alias facultates quibus liominibus profuisti, spectas, 
tibi ut Ciceroni licet vcre et modeste profiteri : " ( Je- 
teros pudeat, si qui so ita littcris abdiderunt, ut nihil 
possent ex iis neque ad communem affcrre fructum 
neque in aspectum lucemque proferre; me autem 
quid pudeat qui tot annos ita vivo ut a nnllius un- 
quam me tempore aut commodo aut otium meum 
abstraxerit aut voluptas avocarit aut denique somiius 
retardarit 1 " 

Ergo pro sociis nostris qui tua disciplina i'ructi 
sunt et tuos mores facillimos novcrunt, pro sociis tuis 
qui amicitia et laboribus tecum sunt conjuncti, pro 



14 

hoc frequentissimo conventu hominum, pro omnibus 
sapientiae cultoribus, te salvere jubemus ; ef speramus 
fore ut haec aniversitas quae, quanquam multorum 
capitum et plurium corporum fuit, adhuc floruit, te 
praeside, valeal el rebus secundis fruatur. 



ADDRESS 



OF 



HIS EXCELLENCY, NATHANIEL P. HANKS, 

GOVERNOR OF THE COMMONWEALTH, 



RETLY 



OP 



I* RESIDENT EELTON 



ADDRESS. 



Professor Felton : — 

The members of the Corporation and the Overseers 
of Harvard College are assembled on this occasion 
for the purpose of completing, by unostentatious yet 
solemn ceremony, your induction to the office of 
President. 

The service assigned to me is to present to you 
the Charter and Keys of the institution, as symbols 
of your office and authority. In performing this 
simple duty, I need not commend to you, Sir, the 
important educational interests committed to your 
charge, as the head of this ancient University. No 
one can better understand its relation to pupils, the 
people, and the State. More than thirty years passed, 
with slight interruption, within the immediate circle 
of its influence, as student, alumnus, tutor, Professor 
in different departments, — enriched as that period 
has been by experience of foreign travel, with a 
special eye to your duties, and a generous devotion 
to the general educational interests of the State, — 
cannot fail to have given you a full appreciation of 
the dignity of the office, or the important influence 
3 



18 

which a wise, just, and firm administration of its 
powers can impart to the cause of education through- 
out the land. 

For the first time the University may be said to 
have educated, and, so far as that result can be 
achieved by outward opportunities and influence, it 
has watched the growth and fashioned the character, 
of its presiding officer. An unhesitating election by 
the Corporation ; the unanimous confirmation by a 
large and intelligent Board of Overseers ; the ap- 
proval of the Faculty and Alumni ; the undissembled 
satisfaction of the Undergraduates ; the unreserved 
confidence inspired in scholars and intelligent men 
everywhere, — all of whom are properly represented 
in this assembly, — assure us that the President it has 
created is equal to his commission, and will faithfully 
discharge its duties. Like one who rises from the 
ranks to the head of an army, you will possess in the 
confidence of your associates and the public a power 
which a more eventful life and higher attainments 
even might fail to confer. 

It is my pleasant duty, Sir, in obedience to a cus- 
tom never yet broken, as the Chief Executive Magis- 
trate of the Commonwealth, to welcome you to the 
academic honors with which you are this day crowned. 
I solicit for your administration the co-operation of 
the people, the Legislature, the Corporation, the 
Board of Overseers, the Faculty, and the friends of 
thorough, manly, and truthful education everywhere. 
I solicit at the hands of the Undergraduates, upon 
whose concurrence in the general policy of the insti- 



19 

tution so much depends, a like generous and manly 
support ; not so much because your measures will be 
adapted to the views or caprices of individuals or 
coteries, or that the reasons upon which they may 
rest will be anticipated or instantly appreciated, as 
that your long and honorable official career has given 
unforfeited pledges of a purpose to do right ; that 
the cause of enlightened education demands for this 
honored University a responsible head ; and that its 
high purpose is, not to minister to the preferences of 
favorites, but to create men to whom may be safely 
intrusted in part the direction and the responsibili- 
ties of an age that promises to be as stirring and 
eventful as any that has preceded it in the history of 
states or men. 

I should fail to discharge my duty, did I not ad- 
vert to the unflagging interest which the government 
of the State has manifested in the prosperity of this 
University. It was but two years after the establish- 
ment of a Legislature, that, among its first impor- 
tant acts, liberal provision was made — not instantly 
realized, it is true — for the foundation of this insti- 
tution of learning, which had doubtless been contem- 
plated from the first planting of the Colony. And 
it has shared with other colleges and schools the 
munificent and wise educational appropriations which 
have conferred such lasting honor upon the founders 
and people of the State. The interest of the people 
in its welfare is signally exhibited in the fact, that it 
is the only institution, not immediately connected 
with the routine operations of government, that is 



20 

specified by name in the Constitution of the Com- 
monwealth. 

Surely the services which it has rendered in return 
should not be forgotten. Its prosperity assures us, 
as it assured those who preceded us. that k * learning- 
is not to be buried in the graves of our fathers." 
The first President oi' the University born on this 
side of the Atlantic, was the chosen agent of the 
infant Colony to represent its interests in England, 
who obtained from William and Mary the great 
Charter, of which ho was reputed a chief author, that 
brought to an end the rigid, theocratic form of gov- 
ernment which for sixty years upheld the union of 
Church and State, and gave to freeholders, equally 
with church-members, the right to representation and 
participation in the affairs of government. Whether 
this fundamental change in the constitution of the 
body politic contributed more or less to the purit\ oi' 
government, 1 cannot say, but it is certainlj a priv- 
ilege which non-professors would surrender with re- 
luctance, and must be classed among the earliest 
triumphs oi' the principle of the supremacy of the 
people. 

The first Governor oi' the Commonwealth under 
the Constitution, at the inauguration of one ot* the 
most distinguished oi' your predecessors, did not hesi- 
tate to say that the College had been in some 1 sense 
the nurse ami parent of the Revolution. 

We recall with pride the names oi' its graduates, 
Hancock and Adams, the immediate Presidential 
successors oi' Washington and Monroe, and distin- 



21 

guished men in every walk of private and public 
life, Dot forgetting those least, known t<> fame, who, 
as unassuming but influential citizens of the towns 
of the Commonwealth, gave their energy and wisdom 
to the affairs of local governments, which, reflected 
subsequently in legislative acts, constitute the hotly 
of our statute laws relating to the churches, schools, 
highways, and town governments, to which Mas- 
sachusetts owes so much of her prosperity and re- 
nown. 

The education of the young is one of the noblest 
prerogatives that can fall to the lot of man. It is 
higher than the authority of states. Even the home 
circle would be stripped of much of its importance 
were it deprived of the right of moral, mental, and 
physical culture prescribed hy affection and duty. 
Education opens to young men the avenues of sci- 
ence, invention, and discovery, — sometimes of for- 
tune and fame, but as often, perhaps, of suffering 
and sorrow. By some foreordination, if would seem 
as though none of the human family were permitted 
to approach the inspirations of a higher existence, 
without tasting in some measure the throes and 
agony of this. Knowledge is not always happiness, 

but it never fails to confer dignity and power. The 
solitary student, wearing away a life of labor, un- 
known to authority and to men, may till the world 
with the inspirations of his soul. May we not hope 
thai so much of this marvellous, life-creating, world- 
changing power as may he imparted to the young 
within the walls of this University, may he exerted 



22 

for the benefit and not for the destruction of men ; 
that its conquests may he those of peace, and not of 
uar ; that it may inscribe upon the flowing folds of 
its spotless banner the words, Truth, Justice, and 
Freedom ; that its disciples may feel that the chief 
object of their novitiate here is not mere attainments, 
but the discovery of the best methods of attainment ; 
that they may never lose faith in men or the right, 
nor join the ranks of those described by the great 
master of human nature as men who think to " cir- 
cumvent God"? And as Hancock was justified in 
regarding the College as a nurse and parent of the 
American Revolution, may we not hope that it will 
remain forever, under whatever administration of 
University or State, the propagandist and conservator 
of Christian literature and well-regulated and uni- 
versal liberty % 

Massachusetts is not the only State that has made 
liberal provision for education. No wise or pros- 
perous ruler in any age has been willing to forego 
altogether the advantages of so great a power. But 
in other governments the system established has 
been intended to perpetuate and strengthen the priv- 
ilege of rulers. The system inaugurated by Massa- 
chusetts is one intended to improve the condition of 
the people, and to be administered in concurrence by 
the State and the people for their mutual advantage. 
At no period of our history has the unity of interests 
been more strongly marked than at present. And I 
regard it as one of the most auspicious indications of 
the time, that the distrust sometimes existing be- 



23 



tween the friends of collegiate and common school 
education has, in a great degree, disappeared. The 
liberal foundation of State scholarships, and the suc- 
cess of students admitted to them, in all the colleges, 
and the recent provision made for instruction of 
teachers of the public schools, in certain branches 
of natural science, in this institution, I regard as 
most important steps, tending directly to the ultimate 
harmonious co-operation of all the educational in- 
terests within the Commonwealth. 

Your predecessors in office have not failed to en- 
large the scope and to strengthen the capacity of the 
institution. I need not recall the memories of Dun- 
ster, Mather, and Kirkland, in proof of this. The 
living men who honor us with their presence, — your 
immediate predecessor, whose resignation has been 
so reluctantly and regretfully accepted ; another, 
whose fame is honorably identified with the historic 
literature of his country ; another still, whose elo- 
quence has made his name a part of the history of 
the Father of his Country ; and the last, the earliest 
of living Presidents and the noblest of men, who 
must be classed among honorable men, though, like 
Juvenal, we reduce the number of the good to that 
of the gates of Thebes or the mouths of the Nile, — 
such men are a sufficient attestation of the fact. I 
can only wish you a like honorable service and suc- 
cess. 

I present to you the Charter and the Keys of the 
College, and in the name of the Corporation and 
Overseers, in the name of this assembly, I salute you 
as President of the University of Cambridge. 



REPLY. 



Your Excellency : — 

It is with the deepest sensibility that I assume the 
office of President of Harvard College. I am grate- 
ful to you for the friendly terms in which, as Chief 
Magistrate of this ancient Commonwealth, you have 
given to the appointment your official sanction. The 
present state of the University, thanks to the wise 
conduct of its affairs by my predecessors and their 
associates, is prosperous beyond all former example. 
I congratulate myself that I am called to its direction 
when I may hope to avail myself of the counsels of 
four distinguished men who have held it before 
me, and that my associates are old friends, with 
whom I have long acted in uninterrupted harmony. 
But my chief reliance must be the blessing of Al- 
mighty God upon honest intentions and strenuous 
endeavors. 

I congratulate myself also, your Excellency, that 
I am introduced to this station by a Governor of the 
Commonwealth under whose administration an im- 
portant means of scientific culture for the people — 



'25 

the Museum of Natural History — has been added 
to the institutions of Cambridge. Sir, to whatever 
loftier heights of power and fame you may hereafter 
ascend, you will recall with satisfaction the service 
you rendered to science by the enlightened influence 
you exercised in behalf of the noble endowment 
granted to that establishment by the State. In the 
name of Letters and Science, I take this public occa- 
sion to thank you. 

Your Excellency, I know what College life is. 
One-and-thirty years passed in the service of the 
University have been my apprenticeship. I know 
what College students are ; five-and-thirty years I 
have been one myself. Their virtues are dear to me ; 
their faults I understand ; I neither extenuate them, 
nor exaggerate them, nor fear them. I shall press 
upon the young men the duty of obeying the laws, 
and the sacred obligations of thorough and conscien- 
tious study, as the only means of doing justice to 
themselves, their parents, and the University. The 
influences of the place, and the example of renowned 
predecessors, are powerful aids in forming the char- 
acter and inspiring the generous ambition to excel. 
I shall not forget to invoke them. 

I shall do my best, your Excellency, to promote 
the highest interests of the successive classes ; I shall 
not weaken the discipline which has always distin- 
guished this University, and made its halls fit dwell- 
ing-places for studious and virtuous youth. Discipline 
is the preparation for life. Obedience is the prelude 
4 



26 



to command. So far as in me lies, I shall maintain 
the canse of order and steady industry, by aiming to 
secure, not the gratification of the moment, but the 
lasting good of the academic youth, as intellectual, 
moral, and religious beings. 



THE GRADUATE'S RETURN: 



ORATION 



THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 



TRIENNIAL FESTIVAL, JULY 19, 1860. 



SAMUEL OSGOOD, 

MINISTER OF THE CHURCH OF THE MESSIAH, NEW TOEK CITY. 



ORATION. 



Mr. President, and Brethren op the Alumni : — 

The swift years have brought us once more to this 
cherished festival of letters and good-fellowship, and 
the new auspices under which we meet to-day, in- 
stead of eclipsing, ought rather to brighten the in- 
terest of our reunion. We have been invited to take 
part in the inauguration of our brother, the President 
elect, and with cordial respect complying, we yet 
keep our own established usages, hold our own time 
and ground, and speak our own free word alike of 
greeting and declaration. It would be easier, and 
in some respects, undoubtedly, more agreeable, for me 
simply to express your good wishes and take my seat. 
But I cannot with propriety disregard your customs 
and express instructions, and substitute ceremonial 
congratulation for regular discourse. The presence 
of so many superiors, instead of depressing a speaker, 
ought rather to cheer and encourage him by thoughts 
of the old times when we stood on this platform by 
command of the fathers, and by bringing him nearer 
you as brothers. As a brother — one of the rank 
and file, not above you but among you — I would 



30 

stand here to-day, and speak a word that may be as 
much yours as mine. It is, I believe, a rule that is 
held good both by man and woman, that he who 
loves much has a right to say something-. In the 
love of Old Harvard, as one among the many the 
sunshine of whose life has come from our Alma 
Mater's smile, let me take the subject from the occa- 
sion, and speak of "The Graduate's lleturn from the 
World to the University." To-day we return to the 
University, where in youth we studied together, from 
the world, where in manhood we have been working 
together. Here, then, our manhood stands face *to 
face with our youth, and the encounter will be not 
sad, but cheering, if we can maintain our doctrine 
that as men we are bound, not to lose, but to realize 
whatever was best in the spirit, objects, and fellow- 
ships of our youth. Upon this simple thread of 
association, let our thoughts run their own easiest 
way. 

I. Here in our youth we studied together. Dwell 
a moment upon the spirit of those early days. It 
seems now but yesterday that we lived within these 
College walls. We were youths then, — not boys, 
not men ; not boys, with passions dormant, with set 
tasks for the patient memory, and with wills in lead- 
ing-strings under the parental roof; not men, either, 
under the burden and heat of the day, full of care for 
bread or name. We were youths, emancipated from 
boyhood and on tin 1 way to manhood, with fresh 
blood coursing through our veins, and with a sense 
of new freedom, at once impatient of restraint and 



31 

earnest for progress. How could we fail, then, of a 
certain enthusiasm, that must show itself in our tone 
of life, and inula 1 us in fact what we were in name, — 
young students ? 

Students ! Mark that word. Not mere school- 
boys learning lessons by heart, — not professional 
adepts, using the fruits of previous study, or, if 
studying, doing so with an eye to professional work, 
— but students; and, as the term implies, carrying 
the freshness of curiosity into our pursuits, and 
bent upon some kind of knowledge. If any of us 
were a little dull in the recitation-room, and more 
earnest for the laboratory or the garden than for the 
regular text-books, we were generally studious in 
some way, — in some way, if not the best, seekers for 
light to open new paths to young and eager eyes. 
Every old hall and tree recalls the enthusiasm of 
those days, and we see ourselves restored in these 
youths, who have the freshness of the morning on 
their cheek, and the light of new studies in their 
eye. Here Aoavs the wonderful fountain of life, that 
has always seemed the same, though always chang- 
ing, like the old Helicon, whose waters ever held the 
same hue and sparkle, although constantly passing 
away. As we look upon this fountain of Youth, 
fresh and new as in the old times two centuries ago, 
we find ourselves claiming it as our own, and are 
half ready to quarrel with these young students for 
taking our goods and stealing our lost youth. But 
let them have it. It is theirs now, as it was ours 
once ; and when they are as old as we arc, they may 



32 

find that there is something far better that should 
come with time, and that true experience ripens, in- 
stead of blighting, the blossom of early enthusiasm. 

The dull world may deny this, and try to set up 
an impassable barrier between youth and manhood, 
in the name of its pet word, experience, as if the prosy 
sound must needs put all young enthusiasm to flight. 
We accept the word, but not in any disheartening 
sense, not allowing for a moment that wisdom im- 
plies the death of any generous feeling. True, in- 
deed, there is a time when we are tempted to lose 
our ideal in the actual, and perhaps think that a 
dull worldliness is the necessary cost of experience, 
— ready to say with Schiller, — 

" The chains of fancy all are rent 
And all her fair creations flown ; 
The pleasing faith has passed away 
In beings which my visions bore ; 
Reality has made its prey 
Of what seemed beautiful before." 

With experience, indeed, many illusions must pass 
away, and in two chief ways time is likely to chill 
something of our early fervor. The passage from 
fancy to fact puts the stern limit of reality before 
our young dreams, and as in youth we dream of a 
hundred careers, and in manhood, according to the 
cruel laws of time and space, we must be content to 
have but one career, we must expect empires of air- 
castles to dissolve into mist the moment we ex- 
change dreaming for waking, and build upon the 
solid ground. In the next place, the passage from 



33 

the contemplative to the active, or from the cognitive 
to the conative state of mind, startles us from our 
quiet studies and fair visions by revealing the law of 
labor, that is quite as inexorable as the limit of time 
and space. We see that we must not only change our 
2)0st but our posture, not only our material but our 
mood, and upon actual things do actual work. So 
be it, and what then 1 Accept the limit of necessity, 
and submit to the law of labor. But why abate one 
jot of heart or hope, as the field is before us and the 
battle is to be won? Because we are face to face 
with fact, are we not to open our eyes wider, instead 
of shutting them, and to put forth our hands more 
bravely, instead of folding them in dainty indolence ? 
Certainly, limitation should deepen enthusiasm in- 
stead of killing it, and the moment the game starts 
up in our path, we need more eye and more courage 
than while we were curiously watching the clouds 
chase each other across the sky. Labor also ought to 
quicken enthusiasm, alike by bringing our thoughts 
to a practical point, such as favors insight as well as 
oversight, and by adding the force of manly will to 
the ardor of youthful susceptibility. Under both 
points of view, we maintain that true enthusiasm 
should deepen with experience, and if actual affairs 
at first may chill the untried student, he will find 
his courage rising, instead of falling, as he takes a 
real interest in them, and so rises from the actual to 
the real, or from the show to the substance. Limita- 
tion, instead of contracting, should concentrate his 
thoughts; and labor, instead of hardening, should 
5 



34 

strengthen his purpose. Thus he comes to a real 
enthusiasm instead of one mainly ideal, or to a fervor 
more the fruit of the earnest purpose and the effec- 
tive will, than of the roving fancy or the curious 
intellect. The fancy and the intellect catch some- 
thing of the new zest of reality indeed, and the eye 
bent on real good may have a quicker sight for 
beauty and a deeper insight into truth. Thus the 
true student, when become a master of his working 
art, is a student still, and as first studies lose their 
freshness, higher studies under the imperial word of 
positive duties open their more celestial gates, and 
bring the childlike seeker near the inmost shrine. 

But why speak only of the power of the working 
will upon the taste and intellect? Why not urge 
its worth as a fountain of original inspiration and 
strength I Why not clearly say, what all sound 
philosophy and history assure us, that the student 
must become a worker in order to have his full ani- 
mation, and that the active will, quite as much as 
the inquisitive intellect, can be inwardly moved, and 
faithful service adds heroic fire to quiet study I With 
all that is claimed for the strength of youthful spirit, 
it is certainly the frequent trouble with our early 
purposes, that they are more visionary than effective, 
more aspiring than inspired, and that in our early 
plans, as in our scribblings in verse, we are apt to 
make the fatal mistake of confounding aspiration and 
inspiration, and so mocking daring aims with lame 
achievements. In our relations to nature, mankind, 
and to God, it is the hardest of all things to rise from 



35 

susceptibility to energy, and to do our part, instead of 
expecting everything to be done for us. A weakness, 
even of physical tone, is no uncommon trait of stu- 
dent life, and the mind languishes in want of the 
natural help from the body, even the moral and 
religious faculties catching the feebleness of the 
nerves and muscles. Hence, the need of giving to 
college recreations, as well as studies, more of the 
tonic force of active life, and preparing our youth to 
be brave in the great battle to come, by the sports 
that stir courage as well as develop strength. Pro- 
fessor Erdmann of Halle has some excellent observa- 
tions on this point in his recent spirited lectures on 
University education, and he strenuously maintains 
the superiority of the chivalrous sports that invigo- 
rate the spirits, over the gymnastic exercises that only 
swell the muscles, commending the arts that o-ive 
youth mastery over the elements and over brutes, 
and, if need be, over rude men, and declaring a riding- 
school as important as a library to students, and that 
it should be as cheap and accessible. Certainly, 
academic education is, of itself, very deficient in the 
training of active power, and the constructive will 
must put forth its force before the true enthusiasm, 
the real animation, and even the constructive im- 
agination, can be known. The earnest worker, and 
he alone, can know that a determined purpose may 
be as creative and spontaneous as the susceptible 
fancy, or the inquisitive intellect, and the brave right 
hand may write out in solid deeds as stirring lyrics 
as any that are breathed in song. Now surely in 



36 

manhood the active will comes to its best conscious- 
ness, and may find itself most vitally moved, alike 
from human sympathy, professional discipline, and 
divine influence. Manhood is therefore the time for 
a ripe and real enthusiasm that unites active strength 
with intellectual sensibility, brings out the real man 
in his energy as well as his susceptibility, and makes 
the wise head and the ready hand work together, 
whilst the generous heart stands loyally between the 
two, and with cheerful pulses, like a musical band, 
beats brave marches for their journeying and peace- 
ful requiems for their rest. 

In this spirit we face our youth to-day, and bathe 
anew in its morning freshness, stoutly refusing, how- 
ever, to ask the shadow to turn back on the dial, or 
to bewail the flight of years as the death of generous 
feeling. If we have been true to our early days, we 
carry their blessing and power forward with us as 
we go, as the calm full stream bears the mountain 
spring with it in its large and beneficent tide, and 
in waters that still sparkle takes goodly fleets upon 
its bosom, and nurtures sweet blooms and rich fruits 
upon its banks. Thus surely a true man maintains 
and deepens the enthusiasm of youth, if less ardent, 
more fervent than of old, and if less ready to take 
fire, more able to carry fire than when in his teens. 
So it is that all loyal service, instead of forgetting 
freedom, does but fix and perpetuate it, as free in 
duty as of old free in enjoyment or curiosity, with 
a liberty that is a power instead of a mere idea, an 
effective force instead of an exacting desire, and 



37 

escaping the world's dull drudgery not by droning 
imbecility, but by brave fidelity. So the true man 
finds himself as the years pass, ever returning to 
what was best in his youth, and singing with new 
heart the old lays of faith and fellowship. Such has 
been the way with all real humanity in the career of 
the great historical races that have marched west- 
ward to build up the city of God on earth. As 
these races have advanced in their course of con- 
structive conquest, their heroic will has ever re- 
affirmed the faith that led them from the cradle of 
Oriental quietude. The countrymen of Paul, Chry- 
sostom, Ambrose, Charlemagne, Alfred, Luther, Wash- 
ington, as they have done brave deeds, have said 
more deeply the old hymns and prayers of Hebrew 
bards and prophets. Not only with trembling harps 
and pealing organs, but with ringing anvils, cleaving 
ploughshares, whirling spindles, rustling presses, 
speeding ships, cheering bugles, and hurrying emi- 
grant trains, they are chanting the old Te Deums 
and Glorias, in deeds as well as in words, that circle 
the globe, and make the outgoings of the morning 
and evening to meet and rejoice together. In this 
spirit we return to our morning land, and ask that 
experience may ripen into manly fidelity the impul- 
sive enthusiasm of our youth, instead of sinking it 
into dreamy worldliness, or evaporating it in airy 
caprice, and when it is time for our day to sink into 
the Western shadows, our sun may hang out with 
richer, trophies upon his evening pavilion the same 
crimson banner which he unfurled as he began his 



38 

morning march, and the vesper hymn may deepen 
the thanksgiving and not dash the joy or the hope 
that spoke in the morning prayer. Such a faith 
binds our days together by " natural piety," and man- 
hood transforms the spirit of youth into the practical 
realism that is earnest to take all good gifts to itself, 
and to make them into true uses, so joining the 
receptive and the active powers together, as to pro- 
mote the student into the worker, the disciple of 
knowledge into the Master of Arts. 

II. Returning thus to the spirit of our youth, we 
are in a position to see it in action and consider 
its leading object. Coming hither from the world 
where we have been and are working together, we 
see more clearly, that the peculiarity of our College 
life was in the fact that we studied together. Those 
two words, study and work, tell the story of the 
objects of our youth and manhood, as the words en- 
thusiasm and experience tell the story of spirit of the 
two seasons. Of course, to study is to work, and to 
work with any sort of sense or spirit is, more or less, 
to study. But the difference between the working 
student and the studious worker is this, that the 
student works in order to study, and the worker 
studies in order to work ; with the former study 
being the object of work, and with the latter work 
being the object of study. So important is this dis- 
tinction, that it cannot wisely be set aside by trying 
to make the young student a professional worker, or 
to make the professional worker merely a student. 
The collegian who is obliged to stop in his studies, to 



39 

attend to professional practice, or the professional 
man who has no practice to give point to his studies, 
is in a poor path of improvement. The true method 
is, to give youth mainly to study, and then in man- 
hood leave it not merely to intellectual tastes, but to 
positive professional duties, to give the motive for 
study, that before was found under the discipline of 
teachers. The student is in danger of becoming a 
mere smatterer, if he has not most of his time for his 
books, and the graduate without the positive de- 
mands of a profession upon his time and thoughts, is 
apt to be little more than a dainty amateur, or a 
feeble dilettante. He can study best in youth who is 
free to prepare to work well in manhood, and he can 
work best in manhood who is called to apply well 
the studies of his youth. He who studies in order 
to find truth, continues, instead of breaking off his 
career, when he works truth into practice, and study 
thus bears fruit in work, realizing itself, not nullify- 
ing itself in action. 

To-day we confront our years of study, and there 
is something not wholly cheering in the remembrance 
of our student life, when we were so free to seek 
after truth amid such boundless stores of learnino- 
with teachers so many, so able, and so faithful. But 
if we grieve at all that those years are gone, it should 
be, not because we would always be students, or 
return to these halls, but because we did not use 
our time here well, and are haunted by ghosts of 
old follies, perhaps vices, as we walk through these 
familiar groves. Consider well the life of study led 



40 

by us here, and must we not say that its best treas- 
ures have been returning to us in the path of active 
fidelity, and all true work has revived the objects of 
our study 1 

Without attempting any ambitious classification, 
we may, in harmony with the best thinkers of our 
time, make a very simple and obvious division of the 
studies in a University course, that will suffice to 
show their bearing on the work of our manhood. 
If even that half Pagan, Auguste Comte, allows him- 
self to speak of the hierarchy of the sciences, we 
may, without suspicion of cant or affectation, com- 
pare the range of our studies to a vast temple some- 
what like that which Egypt planned and Judsea 
completed ; a temple with three leading enclosures, 
and presided over by orders of priests. Two chief 
priests meet us at the gate of learning, and never 
leave us at the inmost shrine. These are Mathe- 
matics and Language, the two studies that are the 
conditions of all others, marked from all others by 
being not so much treasures of knowledge as keys of 
the whole treasury, — not so much separate sciences 
as methods of all science, — not so much specimens 
of reasoning, as masters of reason itself; in fact, vir- 
tually teachers of Logic, doing more for the disci- 
pline of thought than the technical manuals of the 
logical art. The one, Mathematics, is severe and 
passionless, — - pure intellect, without demanding the 
least throb of emotion -or any graces of style; the 
other is the organ of human feeling and will, in fact 
the expressed life of man, and is as much suited to 



41 

the study of humanity as Mathematics is suited to 
the study of nature. The two meet us at the gate 
of the temple, and go with us through every sphere, 
up to the highest or inmost shrine, where the stu- 
dent seeks the mercy-seat of Him whose arithmetic 
and geometry are written out in the eternal heavens, 
and whose language is the Eternal Word. Thus 
guided and taught to number and measure, and name 
and define, we entered the outer court of the temple, 
the realm of Physics or Cosmology, and there studied 
nature or the visible universe in the elements and 
forces of its masses and molecules, winning some 
knowledge of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry, 
and regretting that we explored so little that other 
portion of this court now so richly illustrated here 
to students, the department of Organic Physics, or 
Physiology, w T ith its preparations from the fields of 
Natural History. Then we drew near the second 
apartment of the temple, the sanctuary, and there 
the study of man opened upon us in various ways, 
not only in what is technically called Psychology 
or Mental Philosophy, but in all that illustrates hu- 
manity, whether in history, biography, ethics, or in 
the masterpieces of the representative personages of 
our race. We probably learned more of man in this 
latter way than in any other, and we can never be 
sufficiently grateful to our mother University for 
acquainting us so fully with the actual thoughts of 
the great leaders of"the human race in their original 
tongues, and so opening to us the mind, character, 
and speech of the great historical races that have 
6 



42 

made our humanity what it is. Their very names 
are enough to make the pulse beat quicker, as they 
assure us that we have had direct personal acquaint- 
ance with the providential masters of human thought 
under their two great leaders, — Homer, the father 
of old classics, and Dante, the father of our modern 
literature, the first in time and perhaps first in genius 
of the illustrious line of authors who have written in 
the language of modern nations instead of the lan- 
guage of the schools. 

One step more was to be taken, one curtain more 
was to be lifted ; for he surely is a novice, and not 
a master, who has not gone beyond the study of 
nature and of man, to some knowledge of Him who 
is Lord of Nature and Father of Men. Theology is 
the inmost shrine of the temple, to which Physics is 
the outer court and Psychology is the sanctuary. 
We have learned something of Theology, and, not 
speaking now of express theological education, have 
we not all cause to be grateful that so much wisdom 
and zeal were devoted to giving us distinct ideas of 
the being and attributes of God, and of the eternal 
aims of human life "? If Paley or Grotius did not 
do for our faith all that we asked, the chapel pulpit 
came nearer the mark, and its faithful ministry was 
to ,some of us a greater help than any other depart- 
ment of the University, — leaving impressions that 
come back to us with every good purpose and ear- 
nest prayer. We were crude youths then, not with- 
out some share of folly ; but who of us had not some 
sense of the perfections of God, the dignity of duty, 



43 

and the reality of divine influence X Heaven's bless- 
ing upon our Alma Mater for thus consecrating learn- 
ing by piety ; and let her sons manfully say now and 
always, that Theology is first of sciences, and Re- 
ligion is the first of arts. Let them manfully say, 
that when a petulant sectarianism, or a self-indulgent 
secularism, shall succeed in driving Theology and 
Religion from these halls, the name of John Harvard 
should be erased from the Charter, and the founda- 
tions of these old walls should be upturned. It is 
Theology that created this University, and in fact 
established in the world the very idea of a Univer- 
sity, — that institution at once comprehensive and 
organic, combining all sciences under one sovereign 
wisdom. Other sciences give multiplicity, but only 
Theology gives unity, and makes the many into one. 
This only can interpret the range and unity of the 
whole temple, as Bacon has so nobly observed in his 
immortal Essay on the Advancement of Learning, a 
copy of which Harvard gave with his other books to 
this library : " But to those which refer all things to 
the glory of God, they [the three views of the uni- 
verse presented by him] are as the three acclama- 
tions, ' Sancte, Sancte, Sancte ' ; holy in the descrip- 
tion and dilatation of his works, holy in the connection 
and concatenation of them, and holy in the union of 
them in a perpetual and uniform law." 

Such was the temple of learning that we fre- 
quented here in years gone by, and surely more than 
once we heard the according voices of the hierar- 
chies of science as they joined in worship of Him 



44 

the only true, and study sometimes kindled into 
adoration. Where is that temple now, or what is 
our familiarity with its courts % Have the inexorable 
years that drove us from these halls of learning, 
driven us from that shrine, and left us to drudge for 
bread in this working-day world ] It surely is not 
wise to deny that there are some points of painful 
contrast between the former life of study and the 
present life of work ; not wise to deny that, as early 
enthusiasm is apt to die out in dull worldliness, so 
early study is apt to give way to mere business, and 
neglect the light of first principles for the empiricism 
of the passing day. Too many of us renounce learn- 
ing for timeserving expediency, and not a few who 
were quick at mastering the contents of books for 
the recitation-room, are utter drones at reading men 
and things, to make living report of them in timely 
thoughts and apt deeds. For this frequent falling 
off from college promise, there is ample occasion, if 
not ample reason, since in study and in work not 
only do the materials differ, but also the implements 
and powers, — not only the matter, but the manner ; 
the materials in the one case being choice books, and 
in the other case the world as it is, with its stubborn 
men and things, — the powers in the one case being 
mainly the receptive taste and intellect, and in the 
other case the practical judgment and the aggressive 
will. But is there any essential antagonism, there- 
fore, between study and work 1 Nay, does not true 
work upon actual matter in actual manner complete 
the student's education, and enable him to work into 



45 

reality the truth that he before studied out in idea 1 
Ought not practical usefulness to give point to the 
lessons of books, and the active judgment and will 
combine with the taste and intellect to bring out the 
powers, as well as the truth of things % Truth itself 
does not become wholly real, nor touch and interpret 
and master reality, until embodied in virtue; and 
how profoundly Lord Bacon again observes : " In 
general and in sum, certain it is that 'Veritas' and 
' bonitas ' differ but as the seal and the print ; for 
truth prints goodness ; and they be the clouds of 
error which descends in the storms of passions and 
perturbations." Let the earnest scholar accept this 
idea, and he will find that his working years are 
printing more clearly the truths of his student years, 
and that, as he goes on his loyal way, he is ever re- 
turning to the studies of his youth, occupying as a 
master the school that he before visited as a pupil, 
ministering as a priest where he before listened as a 
hearer or gazed as a spectator. 

As we try to do our work faithfully, and make our 
own mark upon men and things, do we not find old 
truths deepening under our active hand, and new 
substances and powers presenting themselves to be 
interpreted by first principles 1 We work indeed 
upon stubborn material, but resistance develops new 
powers in us and new qualities in the resisting ob- 
ject, — qualities that are generally more vital and 
dynamic than the abstractions which we learned in 
books. The result is, that as we have become active, 
the actual world, instead of being soulless, reveals 



46 

more soul ; and instead of losing our ideas in reality, 
reality shows them in their life and force. Nature, 
man, nay, God himself, show their powers to us as 
we touch them with active hand and earnest will, 
and the working view of the universe is surely the 
power view, the hidden forces of nature, the interior 
faculties of man, and the mysterious influence of God 
revealing themselves only to the active worker. 

The true reality, then, is both ideal and actual, not 
the surrender of the ideal to the actual, but the res- 
toration of the one in the other; and as truth is 
carried into practice, it interprets itself not only into 
ideas, but into powers. The true worker, then, instead 
of being driven from the temple of science, finds 
himself returning to it with fuller prerogative, and 
patient obedience wins deepening illumination, as was 
the case with the devotee whom Jeremy Taylor so 
eloquently speaks of, who left a sweet vision of God 
to meet the call of duty, and found the lost vision 
brightening as the lowly duty was done. The true 
realism, then, is at once ideal and actual, one reality 
with its polar diversity. As Coleridge suggests in 
his Friend, are not such men as Plato and Lord 
Bacon different poles of the same real intellect, the 
one more ideal, the other more practical, but both 
needed to exhibit human thought and scientific truth 
in its completeness \ If this is so, then, in our per- 
sonal development, we may hope in a certain way to 
repeat that great experience of the ages, and com- 
plete our own Platonic period of too dreamy idealism 
by a Baconian period of solid utility. Then, too, we 



47 

may hope in our own way to enjoy something of the 
great triumph of modern enterprise in ascending to 
first truths by practical industry, in finding that our 
science is clearer as our art is more perfect, and our 
intuitions deepen as our energies rise. How em- 
phatically this position is proved by the effect of 
active life upon the primal studies, Mathematics and 
Language ! The wonderful science of Calculus has 
sprung up in the practical school of modern art, and 
with the effort to measure the heavens and weigh the 
globes, this mighty method has been invented by the 
intellects of Newton and Leibnitz, and the new har- 
monies of numbers transcend the mystic dreams of 
Pythagoras. The business of the world is constantly 
making new applications of mathematical science, 
and carrying forward its principles. The engineer 
marches in front of the armies alike of war and 
peace, and industry and enterprise wait upon his 
word. One of our own mathematicians tells by cal- 
culation in a court of law the practical value and 
working power of a turbine wheel, and shows in a 
brilliant philosophic paper, that, in the arrangements 
of their leaves upon the stems, the trees correspond- 
ing with the cycles of the planets thus intone celes- 
tial numbers and chant the music of the spheres. 

Every department of Physics illustrates the power 
of the actual manner in discovering and developing 
the truth of things. It is in the laboratory or work- 
shop that the hidden properties of matter are made 
to reveal themselves, and the mysterious affinities of 
the atoms with the latent forces of light, heat, elec- 



48 

tricity, and magnetism appear at the chemist's call. 
Nature in her masses, as well as her molecules, 
obeys the same method, and the earth and the heav- 
ens need to be studied by the active hand, as well 
as the open eye. 

Language, too, develops its light and warmth 
under the electric touch of action, and the eloquence 
that is active never appears in the still air of schol- 
arly seclusion. University life gives the scholar a 
classic vocabulary and a polished diction, but only 
the life university can make him an orator. As he 
feels the spur of necessity, and answers to the sym- 
pathy or animosity of the living world, he finds that 
he can speak with new power from the fulness of 
his old treasures, and that the words once gathered 
with such toil now come to him in full play, as the 
water long and laboriously collected in the reservoirs 
gushes and sparkles in the fountain. If it is too 
much to say, with a recent German writer, that the 
art of thinking is the art of speaking, or that lan- 
guage is thought, it is undoubtedly true that he who 
is master of language is in a fair way to be master of 
thought, and needs little more than earnest practice 
to work his word into power, and make it burn as 
well as shine, by its fire kindling the human heart 
as the light of recluse study can never do. In 
this respect Demosthenes was surely right, and the 
secret of eloquence is not in mere study, but in 
living work. It is action, action, action, and a re- 
cent author, Theremin, confirming the great Athe- 
nian's definition, has rightly called such eloquence 



49 

the virtue of the lips. This virtue has power to 
reveal all other virtue ; and only when studied thus, 
not merely by the spoken, but the acted word, the 
human heart reveals its treasures, and humanity 
opens its hidden deeps to the potent spell. Every 
department of human nature illustrates the same 
principle, and we know man, not only as we read or 
think about him, but as we work with him and upon 
him. 

In fact, all generous and fervent occupation recalls 
and deepens first principles, and every great art, like 
Newton's Astronomy, writes or thinks out its " Prin- 
cipia " more clearly in the school of action. The old 
myth that the Muses were daughters of Mnemosyne, 
beautifully embodies this truth. As the daughters 
perfect the beautiful arts of music, poetry, eloquence, 
and the like, do they not, in their ripening intellect- 
ual beauty and deepening eye, renew their mother's 
image, and does not every flash of their inspiration 
give out the calm, blessed light of the ideal and 
maternal Memory, holding out its clear guardian ray 
upon the opening pathway of their buoyant hope'? 
Does not every beautiful art carry us back to the 
primal source of inspiration, and make us almost 
believe, what some of the ancients affirmed, that we 
pre-existed in the primeval wisdom that made all 
things, and all loyal service restores us to the Eternal 
Mind in the reason that is the remembrance of his 
light, and the habit that is the channel of his will \ 

But why spend many words to prove that work 
ought to be the realization of study, and that he who 
7 



50 

works wisely finds his ideas bearing fruit in deeds, 
and so returning to him with new life and powers. 
Does not the highest truth in philosophy and relig- 
ion fix the principle that the highest or absolute 
reality cannot be known by thought or study alone, 
but by work or obedience'? The active hand only 
can bring out the latent heat of nature, and the 
earnest will only finds the hidden warmth and power 
of God. God is the absolute being, the eternally 
True and Good. Who shall know him except by 
serving him, — serving him in spirit as well as truth, 
in deed as well as thought 1 In this view, how sug- 
gestive is the remark of Melancthon, — in his noted 
Loci Communes, that had so much to do with guid- 
ing the Lutheran Reformation, — that God's Word 
or Son is the manifestation of his thought, whilst his 
Spirit is the manifestation of his will ; — an idea that 
certainly has some confirmation from Scripture and 
its great scholastic expounders. To know the reality 
of God, then, we must know him as Will as well as 
Wisdom ; as Will, which is his proceeding virtue, 
as Wisdom is his proceeding intelligence ; and the 
ultimate fact of Christianity and the crowning bless- 
ing of the Church, the gift of the Holy Spirit, can 
be known only by the human will in working har- 
mony with the Divine will. If the Word is opened 
mostly to the devout student, the Spirit is opened 
mostly to the devout worker, and he only is the true 
scholar or disciple who by study and by work knows 
the living God in the blessed reality of his Word 
and Spirit. He finds, that as consecrated reason 



51 

enters into the universal or Divine reason, so conse- 
crated will enters into the universal or Divine will, 
and so, by study and by work, the seeker solves the 
problem of sages, and knows the Infinite and Eter- 
nal God. 

Such is our doctrine of manly realism in reference 
to the great object of life ; and, in this view, he is 
the only realist, the truly practical man, who is at 
once a student and a worker, uniting ideas with 
deeds. Our position is thus maintained as to the 
object as well as the spirit of life, that manhood is 
bound to realize the promise of youth. 

III. We confirm the same solid and cheerful 
philosophy by considering the fellowships of our 
youth, or the friendships that brought genial spirits 
together for common objects, and so favored our 
pleasure and our studies. Here in youth we studied 
together, and this last' word, " together" is more 
important than any in the sentence. The fact is 
clear that our influence upon each other was the 
most characteristic trait of our college life, and in our 
play, as well as study, we lived and moved in com- 
pany. On the Delta, play would have been penance 
without associates; and in the recitation-room, the 
lessons would have had no zest without the presence 
of classmates as well as teachers. May we not be- 
lieve that the sociality of our youth came not merely 
from sympathetic feeling, but also from a half-con- 
scious conviction of the truth, which has grown upon 
us with every year's observation and thought, that 
individual culture is poor and fragmentary without 



52 

social fellowship, and the true humanity is, therefore, 
not egotistic, but fraternal, — not individualized, but 
associated 1 We need not go far into metaphysics to 
prove that each individual shares in the whole intel- 
lectual and moral capital of his associates ; for the 
first principles of our social nature prove the fact. 
Every citizen, in a manner, owns the whole city, and 
enjoys its treasures of wisdom and humanity. The 
jolly sailor rates himself very much according to his 
ship ; and, if she carries seventy-four guns, he consid- 
ers himself personally as a seventy-four. So, in our 
day, each of us was as big as the whole class, and, as 
seventy-two was our number, each Freshman of us 
regarded himself as a seventy-two ; nor did the asso- 
ciate feeling lessen with time. We certainly had a 
sense of greater wholeness, or of integrating our nar- 
row individualism, by our personal friendships and 
college associations. From chosen friends we per- 
haps derived our best private incentives as well as 
satisfactions, whilst in the ruling public opinion we 
were led to our usual methods of amusement and 
discipline. College notions of honor may have been 
very imperfect, yet they had some elements of true 
loyalty, and college ideas of fellowship may have 
been in some respects lax, but they never wholly lost 
sight of the truth that no man should live for him- 
self alone. 

The composition of a single class of seventy or 
eighty was itself a sufficient study, and the very 
names of our classmates recall to us now a range of 
character that makes the catalogue almost a compend 



53 

of universal history. Can we not remember in our 
associates types of mind as strongly marked as the 
fathers of the old philosophies \ Can we not name 
our Platonist, so ideal and so impractical, ready to 
discourse on Beauty with Hippias, or on Goodness 
with Philebus, and quite as ready to lose himself in 
the misty idealities of the Parmenides, or wreck 
himself upon quicksands in the specious communism 
of the Republic 1 What class had not its keen and 
utilitarian Aristotle, its severe Zeno, its graceful Epi- 
curus, its doubting Pyrrho, and, last of all, its cynical 
Diogenes, the model sloven of college, as sure of 
never wearing a clean shirt on Sunday or a holiday, 
as of snapping at every pet notion or idol of the 
hour'? Can we not recall surprising contrasts of 
character, to be found within a few steps of each 
other, and do not some of us remember two class- 
mates who could easily toss an apple or bandy pleas- 
antry across the bit of green sward between their 
rooms, who were yet as far from each other in tastes 
and pursuits as the poles of the globe 1 The one 
was a combination of Kean and Weslev, uniting 
great dramatic power with high religious enthusi- 
asm, believing himself sometimes visited by harping 
angels, holding prayer-meetings in his room, and, in 
spite of what was called his excessive pietism, com- 
manding the respect of the whole class, even of the 
fast ones, on the ground that, in college phrase not 
yet wholly obsolete with us graybeards, he was a 
downright " good fellow." The other was a kind of 
Grimaldi Galvani, a marvellous compound of fun and 



54 

physics, helping the digestion of the whole class 
by his comic faces and songs, and instructing us all 
by his attainments and experiments in natural sci- 
ence, sometimes combining sport and instruction 
oddly together, as when, returning from sweet Auburn 
(then our favorite college ramble, and not a conse- 
crated cemetery) in triumph, with a monstrous bull- 
frog, the patriarch of the sylvan pond, he invited the 
whole entry to see the application of galvanism to 
the creature's muscles, and the giant croaker breathed 
out his life as an offering to science, in a cry that 
might have enabled Aristophanes to add another and 
more sonorous stanza to his famous Tlapayopr^^iia 
Barpuxav* or concert of frogs. 

Not only the study of individual characters, but of 
their cliques and combinations, is most instructive, 
and a new era will come in academic education, 
when the springs of social feeling among students 
are better understood, and due means are used to 
assimilate the heterogeneous and sometimes conflict- 
ing elements by just ideas and influences. It is a 
bright day surely that sends into a class a few gener- 
ous, gifted, high-minded, and brave youths, who are 
more determined on doing right, than the idlers and 
profligates are on doing wrong ; and, in spite of all 
obloquy and opposition, they are sure to triumph in 

* President Woolsey, when in Athens, went to the ponds near by, to 
learn whether the Attic frogs still kept the accent of their song in the 
days of Aristophanes, and found the same old strain : — 
BpeKeK6Ke£ kou£ Koa£, 

PpfKeKfKet; KOCli; Kod£. 

Aristoph. Ranae, 209, 210. 



55 

the end, and to establish that blessed consummation, 
a sound and ascending public opinion in college, 
such as puts good scholarship and good fellowship 
together, and brings the true spirit to bear upon the 
true object of study. Whatever science or accom- 
plishment is pursued in this temper seems to grow 
with a kind of charmed life, although not prescribed 
in the regular course ; and those of us who remem- 
ber the zeal with which the study of modern lan- 
guages and of extempore speaking was pursued, will 
need no argument upon the worth and power of free 
literary companionship. On the whole, may we not 
safely say, that not only college pleasures, such as 
belong especially to youth, had their life in congenial 
fellowship, but all earnest purposes, such as give 
good promise for manhood, if they did not there 
originate, found therein the most effectual nurture ? 
But why dwell longer on this theme 1 Look to these 
old halls, and to these old friends, — remember, too, 

the cherished faces no more with us in the world, 

and the subject speaks for itself, as we breathe once 
more the charmed atmosphere of old friendships, 
pleasures, and studies. 

But what is our manhood saying or doing in 
answer to the fellowship of our youth X Eenouncing 
it for a churlish selfishness or a dogged individual- 
ism 1 Surely not, unless experience of the world is 
the denial of the best interests of the heart, and the 
knowledge of the world is the death of the generous 
affections. There are indeed some causes that tend 
to isolate and harden the heart when we quit our 



56 

early associates, and go out into the world to seek 
our fortunes. AVe no longer find ourselves among 
companions of age and tastes like our own, and 
perhaps the genial favorite of the whole class finds 
himself posted in a rustic village, on a frontier settle- 
ment, toiling from morning to night for bread. Sep- 
aration and occupation, with their change of home 
and habit, are the two barriers that threaten to shut 
us out from the pleasant companionship of our 
youth, and too many allow themselves to be shut up 
within them. But this should not be so. Separa- 
tion, instead of bringing indifference, should provoke 
fresh loyalty ; and occupation, instead of bringing 
drudging monotony, should move a man- to cheer 
his toil by genial affections, and enlarge his narrow 
walk with all generous co-operation. As we are in 
danger of being narrowed in our range of sociality, 
we should deepen our springs of fellow-feeling, and 
as we are tempted to sink down into the plodding 
craftsman of a special business, we ought to make 
this very speciality the reason for integrating our 
labor by a broader association and a higher fellow- 
ship than ever, if not indeed with the same old com- 
panions, with others of like spirit and objects. As 
we go on our own way and do our own work, we see 
more clearly how much incentive and instruction we 
leave behind us, and feel the need of supplying their 
place. Our separate careers or professions, whilst 
they give us new power and influence, reveal new 
limitations, and show us, what we begin only to 
learn in college, that our gifts are but partial, and 



57 

we all need each other to make ourselves complete. 
Ought we not, therefore, as we advance in years, not 
only to keep alive the geniality of our youth, but to 
deepen it by a new sense of social need and duty, and 
so add the friendship of co-operation to the old friend- 
ship of congeniality? Ought not our classmates 
themselves to be more valuable to us now, with all 
their varied arts and experience, and we more valua- 
ble to them, than when we ate our Commons fare 
together, or when, with joined hands, stout lungs, 
and moist eyes, we sang « Auld Lang Syne," as we 
bade adieu to these old halls \ We allow indeed that 
friendships of mere sentiment are not apt, of them- 
selves, to continue, and the fondest associations of 
youth fall away unless renewed by active service; 
classmates, once bosom friends, passing each other 
with little more than a nod or a word, when no 
longer brought together by kindred principles or 
pursuits. Hence the more need of keeping alive the 
old fellowship by new modes of co-operation, and 
encouraging community of feeling by community of 
interests and duties. As the working habits become 
fixed, and the will, freed from early conflicts, rises 
into a calm and steadfast sense of duty, under the 
universal will, ought not our memory in like tran- 
quillity to rise into the higher sense of companion- 
ship, under the universal light, and ought not the 
best years, alike the most kindly and the most fruit- 
ful, to come after our meridian % We used to read 
together in college, in Pindar's second Olympic, of 
the painless existence, aSwcpw al&va, the tearless ceon 



58 

which faithful souls earn for themselves with the 
gods on high, by toil and virtue. 

aWa napa ptv Tipiois 
Gfoip, olrivfs e^aipop cvODKias (iftuKpvu vtpovTai 
alava. Olymp. II. 65 — 67. 

To hope for such a blessed consummation in this 
world may be too much; but is not a true man 
nearer it al fifty than at twenty! Some one has in- 
deed said that it is best for a man to die at thirty-five, 
for (ben lie lias gone through all pleasures, and has 
nothing new to enjoy. We cannot say so ; and we 
firmly believe that the best growth of the human 
heart comes after the fortieth year, under the kindly 
nurture of home affections and manly fidelity. Ought 
not our golden age to come to us in the autumn 
time of golden fruit, with its crowned labors, fixed 
habits, and loyal memories'? And, as the ripe fruit 
on the tree holds within its ruddy rind the fertile 
seed, image and offspring of the parent seed, thus 
filial in its day of glory, and cherishing the spring- 
time in the harvest, ought not our own autumn thus 
to cherish and renew the spring-time of our life] 
No thoughtful man will deny that there is some- 
thing in faithful work and mature and loyal char- 
acter that tends to renew and exalt all worthy affec- 
tions and make the heart younger evermore. 

In all that we are saying, we are taking it for 
granted that lasting good-fellowship must rest upon 
a ruling idea, and perpetuate itself in some worthy 
service, or that in other words it must be real in its 
aim and in its object, or, perhaps we had better say, 



59 

in its guiding truth and animating spirit. Man 
social, like man individual, lives duly when he has 
light and motive, or eyes to Bee his object and power 
to lay hold of it. Seeing and seeking make up his 
life. Society follows the same laws, and the groat 
fellowships (hat, have ruled the world and still rule it 
follow this law, and upon their standard stale a prin- 
ciple and urge a duty. Every powerful association 
of men rests 14)011 some vital idea and object, some 
reality, at once ideal and practical, that moves the 
living to think and work together, and perpetuates 
the memory of the dead. Not only empires and 
priesthoods, but universities prove (his position, and 
old Cambridge, England, and this new Cambridge 
had their own guiding idea or germinal principle; 
and a passing glance at the origin of these two influ- 
ential institutions exemplifies what all philosophy 
and history teach, — that men enjoy most and achieve 
most when assimilated by a master idea and object, 
and all real companionship rests upon a real faith 
and service. In some respects, what Ave call the 
Realism of the New Cambridge contrasts and com- 
pares emphatically with that of the old English 
University, its mother, and the bequest of John 
Harvard, in 1638, resembles, not only in generosity 
but in faith, the bequest of Hugh Balsham, that 
founded the first college house of St. Peters, in Old 
Cambridge, England, in 1257. In that thirteenth 
century, in which the great universities of England 
and the Continent rose from mere schools of private 
instruction, the old Catholic Realism had reached its 



60 

climax ; and, amidst its highest bloom, sagacious 
eyes might discern the buds of the new culture that 
were to outgrow its glory. It was the age when the 
Romish doctrine of the Real Presence in the priestly 
church and the transubstantiated wafer was taught 
by its great masters, asserted by its great heroes, and 
embodied in its great structures ; the age that pro- 
duced Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theolocjiae, 
and St. Louis, peerless soldier of the cross ; the age 
which canonized St. Francis and St. Dominic almost 
before their bodies were cold in their graves, and 
which began to build the York Minster and the 
Cologne Cathedral ; the age in which England, with 
her barons, and but two years before her Magna 
Charta, trembled under the interdict of Rome, and 
King John licked the dust at the feet of Innocent 
III. It was the age of the great precursors of the 
modern thought, that was to supplant the old Realism 
by the new ; the age of Roger Bacon, the father of 
modern science, and Dante Alighieri, the father of 
modern literature. Old Cambridge was founded by 
Hugh Balsham, afterwards Bishop of Ely, in full faith 
in the Catholic Church, whilst she was, probably, 
without the knowledge of her masters, cherishing 
seeds of the new life ; and the resolutions of honor 
to the founder, shortly after his death, show well the 
grounds of fellowship among those ascetic scholars. 
The University in full assembly decreed, May 26, 1291, 
that on the eve of Saints Vitus and Modestus there 
should be annually a solemn congregation of all the 
Regents, to pray for the soul of the Lord Hugh. 



61 

Those prayers for the dead on saints' days came from 
the heart of the Catholic Church, and stand in broad 
contrast with the new times and the new University. 
We may be, in many respects, wiser than those 
devout scholars ; but we cannot claim to have better 
feelings than they, nor can we help, in some respects, 
contrasting the unity of spirit and object in those 
days with the discords of our time. 

Two dates very near each other, and coming more 
than three centuries after Hugh Bal sham's gift, mark 
the powers that ruled the birth and fortunes of this 
new Cambridge. In 1575, Francis Bacon, a lad of 
fifteen, after two years of residence, left Trinity Col- 
lege, Cambridge, in disgust with the state of learning, 
especially of scientific studies, to seek more light in 
foreign parts; and, nine years afterward, in 1584, Sir 
Walter Mildmay, an English Puritan, founded Eman- 
uel College at Cambridge, telling Queen Elizabeth, 
who rallied him upon his Puritanism, that, whilst 
he would countenance nothing contrary to her estab- 
lished laws, he had set an acorn, " and when it be- 
comes an oak, God alone knows what will be the 
fruit thereof." Of this acorn, John Harvard and our 
Harvard College were fruits, — the fruits of English 
Puritanism, on soil which the invention of Guten- 
berg, the discovery of Columbus, and the refor- 
mation of Luther and Calvin, had done so much 
to prepare. Harvard was educated at Emanuel Col- 
lege, and had no less noted compeers at the Univer- 
sity than Jeremy Taylor and John Milton, — those 
paragons of their time, so like and so unlike, the one 



62 

the dove of the English Church, so fond of nestling, 
with his golden and purple plumage, under the 
shadow of the sanctuary ; the other, that eagle of 
song, so impatient of all enclosures, and panting for 
the mountain and the cloud. In his library, which 
he bequeathed to Harvard College, besides the treas- 
ures from the Greek and Latin classics, and the 
Christian fathers, Harvard brought two authors, who 
have been, perhaps, more than any others, the found- 
ers of what is peculiar in the thought of modern 
Christendom, and surely of our New England, — 
John Calvin, the chief champion of the new divinity, 
and Francis Bacon, the chief champion of the new 
science, — the one the apostle of the new theocracy, 
the other the master of the new humanism. These 
two personages represent the tendencies, the Puritan 
zeal, and the worldly thrift, that so signally combined 
to distinguish modern from mediaeval England, the 
Puritan element predominating under Cromwell, the 
secular element under William and Mary, and a tol- 
erable compromise being brought about between the 
two by the prevailing policy of the English Church, 
which aims to be at once sacred and secular, and 
shrewdly mediate between both worlds. The history 
of New England, and especially of Harvard College, 
turns upon the struggle between the two tendencies 
thus represented, — the theocratic and the humanistic ; 
in the first century the theocratic element prevailing, 
in the second century the scales oscillating between 
the two, and in this nineteenth century the human- 
istic or secular tendencies predominating, until now 



63 

the institution that was at first, and for many years, 
but a school for educating ministers, is pre-eminent 
for its physical science, classic learning, and secular 
schools and accomplishments, — theology, notwith- 
standing its masterly teachers, holding a divided, if 
not a secondary place. We will not quarrel with 
what has been inevitable, nor sigh for the days when 
the theocratic word of Increase Mather and his son 
Cotton, with increasing prerogative, passed for law 
and gospel. We no more wish to bring back Presi- 
dent Increase Mather, the first Doctor of Divinity 
ever made here, than old England wishes to bring 
back Humphrey Necton, the Carmelite friar, who 
received, in 1269, the first doctorate of divinity ever 
conferred by old Cambridge * We welcome the new 
science, yet ask with it for a true sense of the ancient 
faith, and if Bacon has triumphed by leading us to 
the realities of nature, and if the best modern physics 
declares, with Agassiz, in his masterly essay on Clas- 
sification, that there is a spirit in nature, and genera 
and species are real creatures of God, not figments of 
circumstance, nor guesses of man, we ought to be in 
a better condition for discerning the higher realities 
of God, and Calvin's austerity should not hide from 

* Thomas Fuller, in his charming History of Cambridge, records the 
Latin lines that celebrated Humphrey Necton's honors, ami Leland thus 
translates them : — 

" Above the skies, let's Humphrey Necton praise, 
For on him first, Cambridge conferred the bays." 
The original stands thus: — 

"Laudibus Humphredum Necton Astra feremus, 
Qui data GrantansB laurea prima seholae." 



64 

us the great truth, more important and central in 
his pages than any of his harsh dogmas, that the 
soul of man may and should enjoy the real presence 
of the Spirit, and that life is death until this presence 
is known. To vindicate this conviction, and main- 
tain the spiritual element in the social polity, has 
been the aim of earnest thinkers among our alumni 
in every age ; and, in some respects, the new school 
of theologians, since Buckminster and Channing, 
have taken sides with the Mathers and the old 
theocratic party, so far as arraigning the materialism 
of the age is concerned, and asserting the sovereignty 
of God over man. Our Harvard theologians, what- 
ever their creed and name, and all creeds and all 
names we number among our alumni, should think 
their triumph a defeat, if, in assailing theocratic pre- 
tensions, they destroy Christian faith, and, in their 
opposition to the Pharisaism that cares for the mint, 
anise, and cumin, play into the hands of the Saddu- 
cism that cares most for the loaves and the fishes, and 
so substitutes the insolence of worldly prosperity for 
the insolence of sanctimonious zeal. The true religion 
must interpose between the theocrats and the secu- 
larists, harmonize the missions of Calvin and Bacon, 
Edwards and Franklin, Channing and Webster, and 
place spiritual ideas in due relations with the facts of 
nature and the institutions of humanity, by methods 
as winning and effective in action, as wise and ear- 
nest in principle. Our Harvard school of thought 
surely needs a helper to this end, and an unsatisfac- 
tory secularism that provokes an equally unsatisfactory 



65 

radicalism is likely to rule so long as the organizing 
forces of society and letters are left to worldly inter- 
ests, and theology and religion are given over mainly 
to the speculative intellect, their noble ideas allowed 
indeed to range at will through the air, without 
being fixed upon the earth in solid deeds and institu- 
tions. We are well aware that this state of things is 
necessary, but only, we trust, as a transitional stage. 
The old Catholic fellowship could not continue ; and 
the spiritual power, quarrelling with science and hu- 
manity, justly found itself excommunicated by them 
in the attempt to excommunicate them. The quar- 
rel, however, was not because of the war of religion 
with science and humanity, but because of the usur- 
pations of the priesthood; and a better age must 
surely heal the breach, and reconcile the spiritual 
and temporal ideas and powers. 

Even good-fellowship languishes in the absence of 
this higher Realism, as has been and is plainly shown 
in the feuds and asperities of so many earnest think- 
ers among us who ought to be brethren. The very 
animosities of our radicals, that sometimes have 
seemed to us to partake more of the curses from the 
Jacobin Mountain than of the blessings of the Gali- 
lean Mount, have at heart a certain depth of convic- 
tion and a nobleness of aim, more, we trust, like the 
theocratic harshness of the old Puritans, than the 
unbridled hates of the new Terrorists. Something 
is surely wrong, however, at the fountain-head, if not 
of our thinking, surely of our social methods ; and 
we may be certain that the springs of genial com- 
9 



66 

panionship will be filled anew when we learn to 
work together from higher convictions, and upon a 
broader platform. The principle of assimilation 
should be sought from above, not from below ; and 
only the love that is of God has ever had power 
to reconcile characters so marked as those that 
are often antagonists among us, and to subdue the 
harshness of a strong but narrow individualism to the 
catholicity of a genuine manhood. The poorest of 
all intolerance is that which is impatient of diversi- 
ties of character, and tries to make enemies of gifted 
men, who, in spite of their radicalism or conserva- 
tism, ought to be warm friends, and combine their 
various qualities like the colors of the prism, that 
blend in a single ray of white and blessed light. Ill 
fares our culture, and even what we may choose to 
call our humanities, without a positive faith and or- 
ganic method, and we shall feel a higher enthusiasm 
for letters as we accept more devoutly the reality of 
religion, as it speaks to us in its own authority and 
blessedness as to our fathers. Why may we not, 
without renouncing any of our new light, but from 
larger liberty and better insight, repeat loyally the 
old watchword on our College seal, " Christo et Ec- 
clesiae ; " — " Christo," to Christ, in whom the reality 
of God's Word was manifest in living union with 
man ; " Ecclesiae," to the Church, the company of 
faithful souls, in whom the reality of God's Spirit is 
shown in living fellowship with men. 

This faith has made what, in the best sense, we call 
humanity ; and through its progress men have drawn 



67 

nearer each other as they have drawn nearer God. 
It has brought new geniality, as well as strength, to 
the homes and hearts of the people, and given schol- 
ars a unity unknown in the old Attic and Roman 
times. Compare the exquisite odes of Horace, which 
this charming pet of courtiers wrote to such near 
friends as Mecaenas, Postumus, and Torquatus, with 
the hymns that Ambrose, a braver Roman and the 
master of kings, composed alike for prince and peas- 
ant, and how much nobler and more cheering is the 
strain which invokes the Eternal Spirit to lift us 
above the power of time and death, that threaten all 
earthly ties ! As we review our friendships to-day, 
we ask not to sing, with Horace to Postumus, — 

"Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, 
Labuntur anni nee pietas moraui 
Puigis et instanti senectae 
Afferet indomitaeque morti." 

Nor to mourn with him as he writes to Torqua- 
tus, — 

" Immortalia ne speres monet annus et ahnum 
Quae rapit hora diem." 

Let us join, rather, in the morning hymn with 
which Ambrose, the ruder Latinist indeed, but the 
greater man, hailed the dayspring, as it broke upon 
the pagan darkness, and still cheers our day : — 

" Verusque sol illabere 
Micans nitore perpeti 
Jubarque sancti spiritus 
Infunde nostris sensibus." 

If such thoughts as these, which bring the solemn 
names of Hugh Balsham, Catholic Bishop of Ely, and 



68 

.John Harvard, Puritan minister of Charlestown, to- 
gether, and urge the sacred mission of our Univer- 
sity as a school of morals and religion, as well as 
science and letters, may seem too grave for this festive 
occasion, let us remember that nothing unites men 
together so much as the recognition and service of a 
sacred cause, and they who are the bravest comrades 
in arms are ever the most jovial companions at table. 
What can be more cheering and harmonizing to us 
as graduates, than a due sense of the plain fact of his- 
tory, that this institution is the child of God's provi- 
dence, and the ages have been combining to enlarge 
its heritage and to urge its duty. The old Catholicism, 
with its external universality, and the old Puritanism, 
with its internal throne, have bequeathed to us their 
treasures by right of our lineage, and we are false to 
our birthright if we in any way, either by a narrow 
pietism, or a lax and insolent materialism, forsake the 
comprehensiveness and the purity which they sought 
in their way. Accept the high commission, and if 
sometimes, as we note the marvellous progress of 
the new arts and sciences, and see physics and polit- 
ical economy so enlarging their domains and com- 
bining their forces, and almost threatening to build 
up a papacy of naturalism with a god of bread, and a 
priesthood of pence, and a ritual of luxury, we are 
impatient for the rise of a devout, enlightened, and 
< (instructive mind, who shall do for the new learning 
what the ancient faith did for the old, and so build 
up the new City of God, we may take comfort in 
remembering the gradual progress of the former 



69 

civilization, and perhaps believe that the task of 
construction lingers, not because the harmonizing 
spirit is wanting, but because the materials are still 
gathering for the edifice, and the great structure 
must not be built till the stones arc ready and the 
plans matured. Here to-day, however, we can have 
a cheering glimpse of its proportions, and refresh 
our fellowship by a prospect of its fitness and grand- 
eur. Here to-day we base our fellowship upon the 
true Harvard Catholicity, — larger than Roman rit- 
ualism and Genevan legalism, — the Catholicity that 
accepts all truth as God's, and claims it for his ser- 
vice. To-day we do not dash, but quicken our joy 
by owning together the highest principles, and, as we 
walk through these groves and look upon these halls 
and spires, we readily bring our treasures of science 
and letters before the mercy-seat, and cheer and 
exalt our fellowship by the solid Realism that com- 
bines science, humanity, and religion under the same 
Word and Spirit, and calls us to mastery over na- 
ture, fraternity with men, and dependence upon God. 
So we sit down in the sanctuary together, and chant 
our " Sancte, Sancte, Sancte," as we read in those 
three parts of the great temple the diverse, yet 
according books of nature, man, and God, — three 
books, but one truth, as in the " Veritas " of our first 
College seal. Put the two seals, "Christo et Ec- 
clesiae" and "Veritas," on different sides of the same 
banner, and Harvard has a standard worthy of her 
history and her destiny. This is surely better than 
the military flag, under which we once marched 



70 

through the streets of Cambridge, with " Marti et 
Mercurio " on the silken folds. The inscription 
' ; Christo et Ecclesiae " better than any other may- 
declare the spirit of our fellowship, and the word 
" Veritas," covering three books, best expresses the 
largeness of our objects ; for to us they mean the 
books of Nature, Humanity, and Divinity. What 
God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. 

This high allegiance to the mission of the Univer- 
sity gives us new interest in its history and pros- 
pects, reviving, with practical aims, the memory of 
the lives and services of our brother Alumni, whose 
work we are bound to continue. They have labored, 
and we have entered into their labors. We are all 
beneficiaries, and, whether rich or poor, we have 
never paid back the good that we have received. 
Nothing can better stimulate us and our sons, in 
these days of large privilege and ready luxury, than 
a living sense of the zeal and sacrifice given to this 
institution by its great benefactors, and of the need 
of seeking, in a higher sense of responsibility, the 
tonic energy which they found in hardship and con- 
flict and poverty. Let the great company of our 
brethren pass before us in solemn procession, nor 
let us refuse to be as hospitable in heart as our Tri- 
ennial Catalogue is hospitable in word, and let us 
number the dead and the living together here. A 
very simple statement of fact helps us to marshal 
the whole body of the Alumni together in one com- 
pany under three divisions. The lives of three men 
exhaust the history of Harvard University, and em- 



71 

brace the seven and a half generations, from 1636 to 
1860, a period of two hundred and twenty-four years. 
Three lives, bearing date thus : William Hubbard, 
of the class of 1642 (the first of the graduated 
classes), was born in 1621, and died in 1704, aged 
eighty-three ; Nathaniel Appleton, of the class of 
1712, was born in 1693, and died in 1784, aged 
ninety-one; and Josiah Quincy, of the class of 1790, 
was born in 1772, and, Heaven be praised, he is with 
us here to day in his eighty-ninth year. These three 
lives, like three links of a chain, interlock with each 
other, and the middle link is all that is wanting to 
connect us with the contemporaries of Harvard. 
Josiah Quincy, when a boy of twelve, could have 
known Nathaniel Appleton, and Nathaniel Appleton, 
when a boy of thirteen, could have known William 
Hubbard, and William Hubbard was contemporary 
with our founder, being seventeen years old when 
Harvard died. Speak these three names together 
now, and let the centuries of graduates march behind 
them as behind centurions. William Hubbard ! 
advance the seventeenth century, with its Puritan 
strictness and heroism. Nathaniel Appleton ! for- 
ward the eighteenth century, with its bolder think- 
ing and larger empire. Josiah Quincy ! here we are, 
and his venerable name leads this, our nineteenth 
century of graduates, with its broader knowledge 
and finer culture. God grant that they who follow 
may be worthy of such leaders. If we follow our 
academic fathers worthily, shall we not find our fra- 
ternal interest in each other increasing as our zeal 



72 

for sound letters increases, and may not this associa- 
tion of Alumni, instead of being merely a social, be 
also a working bod)', as is the case with the graduates 
of Oxford and Cambridge, who have a voice in the 
University Senate, and an influence upon the whole 
arrangement of the institution'? It is very obvious, 
that, instead of being turned adrift, to forget our 
Alma Miller and be forgotten by her, her sons should 
be more valuable to her after their graduation, and the 
funds of the institution, and the state of opinion 
among undergraduates, would be vastly helped by 
the rise of a new and more active fellowship of the 
Alumni. Better sense of our common heritage, too, 
will rise with better conviction of our own duty, and 
we must enjoy more as we do more together, or 
be more genial companions in wit, as we are more 
loyal comrades in service. 

The work done by our brethren during these cen- 
turies might well make us proud, were it not that it 
so urges fidelity and rebukes our sluggishness. The 
mind of our Harvard lias never ceased to wield a 
leading influence on "\\v American letters, and with- 
out enumerating its achievements in the learned 
professions, and in the arts and sciences connected 
with them, without dwelling upon the names of 
those of our brethren who have occupied places of 
power in State and nation, court, school, and church, 
judges, governors, presidents, legislators, ambassa- 
dors, ministers, masters in every worthy science and 
art, it is enough to name a single branch of liberal 
culture in which our brethren have led, and perhaps 



73 

still lead, the literature of the nation. I mean the 
use of the English tongue in its purity, beauty, and 
force. Our University has been the mother of our 
American prose, and in this she has been queen of 
the art most useful and most- beautiful. It is said 
by that original and perhaps somewhat enthusiastic 
thinker, Lasaulx, of Munich, in a volume just from 
the press, that among all the beautiful arts, whether 
the plastic arts of architecture, sculpture, and paint- 
ing, or the vocal arts of music, poetry, and eloquence, 
the last stands first in honor and in importance, and 
" the world of free prose speech is as large as the 
world of human thought itself." Now surely the 
masters of American prose have come from these 
halls of study, and for nearly a century from its ori- 
gin Harvard College embodied all the literature of 
the land, whilst, perhaps, in this nineteenth century' 
of enlarged culture, she has given to the nation, 
from her own graduates, a large, if not the largest, 
number of the principal classic prose-writers, and 
welcomed to her honors the chief authors from other 
schools. Her sons have created the rich school of 
American History ; and if we to-day throw a fresh 
chaplet on Prescott's recent grave, and name with 
him some ten or twelve of our graduates, from the 
days of Hubbard, Belknap, and Holmes to those of 
Sparks, Bancroft, Palfrey, and Motley, we have, with 
few exceptions, — Washington Irving chief of these, 
— exhausted the list of leading American historians. 
Honor to these our brethren, not only for the learn- 
ing and eloquence, but for the large and hopeful hu- 
10 



74 

inanity, which they have expressed in diction from 
this old well of English pure and undefiled. Honor 
to them and all others, whether in prose or verse, 
who share their fame and their inspiration. The 
water from this sparkling- fountain, whenever, from 
any book or speech, it touches our lips, should re- 
fresh our old fellowship, and quicken braver pur- 
poses, as well as more genial affections. Let our 
new Alumni Hall be built as if over this perennial 
well, and when, from year to year, we meet together, 
let the speech of our brethren, like a sparkling cup, 
pledge us anew to each other, to our founders, and 
to all friends of man and God. Call the spring our 
Castalia ; nay, call it our Siloa, and thank God that 
here, as, in the Providential course of ages, the Greek 
and Roman culture have bowed to the Christian 
faith, and the words of classic beauty have caught 
the spirit of the Word of Eternal Truth. 

In this temper we survey our past and cheer on 
our future, devoutly acknowledging the line of Provi- 
dential agencies that has led us from small begin- 
nings to this day of unequalled prosperity and hope. 
Cuvier tells us, in his Eloge on the naturalist Adan- 
son, that this great explorer of nature, who was once 
so poor as to have no shoes to attend the French 
Institute after his election, asked, in his will, that 
a wreath might be laid upon his coffin, composed 
from the fifty-eight families of plants established in 
botany by him. We do not read of any flowers 
being put upon Harvard's coffin, when, in Septem- 
ber, 1638, the stern Puritans laid the wasted scholar 



75 

in his early grave. But the grateful centuries have 
paid, and are paying, a kindlier tribute; and the fair 
flower and rich fruit of more than two hundred 
harvests of manly culture, more than two hundred 
families of plants, have made his name fragrant 
throughout the world, and his little vineyard has 
been a broad and fruitful garden of God. In the 
beautiful language of Gilman, whose loyal and ven- 
erable head we do not see here now, as three years 
ago, we may point to the humble Colony school that 
rose on these grounds, as the first growth of Har- 
vard's goodly seed, and rejoice in the magnificent 
increase with every succeeding year : — 

" O Relic and Type of our Ancestors' worth, 
Thai bast long kepi their memory warm I 
Firsi. flower of their wilderness ! Star of their night ! 
Calm rising through change and through storm ! " 

Grateful to Harvard and the noble line of our 
benefactors, we thus meditate upon the graduate's 
return, and try to speak in words the blessing that 
we have received in deeds. In this spirit, at once 
serious and cheerful, we, the Alumni of Harvard, 
join for the first time in the inauguration of our 
President. It is easy to salute you, our brother, as 
head of the University to-day, for you are identified 
with all our best academic associations. You guided 
our first studies, and every line of old Homer speaks 
to us your name, and your frequent mercy as well 
as constant judgment. From year to year, your 
kindly face has renewed the welcome, and we feel 
that you arc one of us, and your honor is ours. You 



76 

may depend upon our fidelity in whatever concerns 
the welfare of the University, and the sac-redness of 
its charter and laws. A single word from you will 
bring us all to your side, even if we travel on foot 
over the roads, and ford or swim the rivers on our 
way. We, your brethren, greet you, our President, 
and commend you to God's blessing. As we do so, 
we recall, with filial reverence, the illustrious line of 
scholars who have occupied the chair before you, 
from Dunster's day to this. We rise up to name 
with honor those of that line who are with us still: 
James Walker, Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, Jo- 
siah Quincy, — in themselves a host, their simple 
names to us sufficient titles both of honor and affec- 
tion. In such presence we are one fellowship to- 
day, and, with Dunster's tomb here at our side, and 
with Harvard's monument almost in sight, we may 
join hand in hand, with one voice lifting to the 
mercy-seat the Non nobis, Domine, of our fathers, — 
not unto us, not unto us, but unto God, give the 
glory. 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 



PRESIDENT FELTON. 



ADDRESS. 



My Friends and Fellow-Students : — 

I have accepted the office of President of this 
ancient University, not ignorant of its labors, nor 
inexperienced in its anxieties. The men who have 
preceded me — the illustrious dead, who rest in yon- 
der churchyard, or under the peaceful shades of 
Mount Auburn, — the eminent and beloved among 
the living, who, having retired from this scene of 
duty, adorn, by their inspiring presence, this day 
— have established a standard of official labor and 
responsibility, which may well give pause to any 
man called to succeed them. I dare not compare 
myself with them. The Honorable President, Mr. 
Quincy, who offered me the first appointment I ever 
held in the University, thirty-one years ago, still 
lives, in a frosty but kindly age, and year after year 
honors with his welcome countenance and vigorous 
speech our academic festivities. His successor, the 
bright, consummate flower of American scholarship 
and eloquence, in the rich maturity of his splendid 
genius, rests for the day from his public toils. The 
eminent historian, with whose faithful researches and 



80 

masterly works the name and fame of Washington 
are indissolubly connected, cheers us with his benig- 
nant kindness. My immediate predecessor, the clear 
and profound thinker, the philosopher and divine, 
the unrivalled master of sacred eloquence, who so 
lately held this seat and bore these cares, comes to 
witness the ceremonies, happy, doubtless, that he is 
released from the burden of the office which he 
crowned with so much success and dignity. They 
have, one and all, left their footprints in our aca- 
demic retreats, which I pray God I may be able 
to follow, though it must needs be with unequal 
steps. 

I am happy that the ceremony of inauguration is 
associated with the festival of the Alumni. By the 
organization of our American colleges, the body of 
the graduates have but a slight connection with the 
University after they have once been dismissed from 
Alma Mater's immediate care. They bear no official 
relations to the University, and have no direct influ- 
ence over its affairs. I wish it were otherwise here, 
for Harvard University is properly represented, not 
only by those who are engaged for the moment in 
the studies of the place, but by the great body of 
educated men, who have gone forth into the world, 
and are filling their several posts of duty, labor, 
and dignity ; who are busied in the practical affairs 
of life, in the professions, in science and letters ; 
the lawyers, physicians, clergymen, scholars, states- 
men, and orators. The undergraduates are the 
bright and promising spring, without which there 



81 

could be no summer and autumn ; but the grad- 
uates are the summer and autumn, with ripening 
fruits and gathered harvests. 

On this occasion you will not expect from me any 
elaborate discussion of theories of education ; I ap- 
pear before you, to-day, with no new views to offer. 
I am not a new man here. I am the oldest inhab- 
itant. I believe not one man, — no, not one, — hold- 
ing office in any department of the University, when 
I returned, after an absence of two years, is now in 
active academical duty. In the immediate govern- 
ment of the College, my associates are, with few 
exceptions, men who have been my pupils ; without 
exception, men to whom I have been attached by the 
ties of a friendship which has never been interrupted 
by a passing cloud. Had my personal wishes been 
gratified, I should have been left to the cultivation of 
Grecian letters, and the studies of the professorship 
in which I have passed so many happy years. When 
St. Basil, having long resided in the society of the 
students and philosophers of Athens, was called by 
the duties of life to leave those classic scenes, he 
departed with lamentations and tears. More fortu- 
nate than St. Basil, I am permitted to remain. I 
shall not desert the academic grove ; the voice of 
the Bern a and the Dionysiac theatre still ring in my 
ears with all their enchantments. Homer, iEschy- 
lus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, — I 
shall not part company with you yet. Helicon and 
Parnassus, which my feet have trodden literally as 
well as figuratively, are consecrated names. Hymet- 
11 



82 

tus still yields his honeyed stores, and the Cephissus 
and Ilissus still murmur with the thronging mem- 
ories of the past. I resign my former duties to 
younger and more vigorous hands ; but my excellent 
friend and successor I know will allow me to haunt 
his lecture-room, even to that period of life when I 
shall be like the chorus in the Agamemnon, who 

<J?uAAd8os fjtr) 
KaraKapcpopevrjs, Tp'nvobas pev 68ous 
2rei'xei, iraidus S' ovftev apeiov 
"Ovap fjpepocpavrov aXaivei. 

" When hoary Eld, in sere and yellow leaf, 
Walks his triple-footed way ; 
Nor stronger than a child 
"Wanders — a vision in the light of day." 

Brethren, we stand here to-day as the representa- 
tives of the oldest University on the American conti- 
nent. Our Puritan ancestors brought with them, 
from Oxford and Cambridge, the scholarship of Eng- 
land. They were among the best educated men of 
their times. They were among the noblest men of 
all times. If their memories ever cease to be hon- 
ored here, — if, among the changes that advancing 
years are always making in the opinions and works 
of men, the names of the Puritan fathers shall ever 
be scorned or forgotten here, — the smile of Heaven 
shall no longer rest upon us, and these fair struc- 
tures, now crowded by studious youth, and visited by 
the light of unexampled prosperity, shall crumble to 
the earth, blighted with the curse of God. John 
Harvard, whose honored name the University bears, 
was a Cambridge man, and the name of the place, 



83 

Newtown, was early changed to Cambridge, — Can- 
tabrigia Noy. Anglorum, — Cambridge of the New- 
Englishmen. Harvard College became the corpo- 
rate designation, and the University at Cambridge 
its descriptive synonyme. A seal, bearing the motto 
"VERITAS," was adopted in 1643, but the one 
now commonly used, with the motto " Christo et 
Ecclesiae," was introduced at a later and uncertain 
date. The earliest degrees were conferred by the 
President, with the sanction of the Honorandi Viri 
and Reverendi Presbyteri, upon the Juvenes quos scio, 
tarn doctrina quam moribus idoneos esse, fro more 
Academiarum in Anglia, according to the usages of 
the Universities in England. Indeed, the early so- 
ciety of New England generally was organized upon 
the social principles of Old England. 

The precedence yielded to rank, the privileges, 
exemptions, and honors conceded to esquires and 
knights (there were few of higher rank among the 
Puritan aristocracy), would astonish and offend this 
easy-mannered age. These social views were shared 
by the scholars and governors of the infant College. 
In the class-room and chapel the scholars sat accord- 
ing to the acknowledged rank of their fathers. It is 
ordered by the earlier laws, that " scholarium quis- 
que donee primo gradu ornetur, ni sit commensalis 
aut nobilis alicujus Alius, aut militis primogenitus, 
suo tantum cognomine vocator," — " Let every schol- 
ar, until he receives his first degree, be called only by 
his surname, unless he be a fellow-commoner, or the 
eldest son of a knight or nobleman." Some of the 



84 

ancient laws are more applicable to the present time 
than the one I have just quoted. For example, "they 
[the scholars] shall honor as their parents, magis- 
trates, elders, tutors, and aged persons, by being 
silent in their presence, except they be called on to 
answer, not gainsaying, showing all those laudable 
expressions of honor and reverence in their presence 
that are in use, as bowing before them, standing un- 
covered, or the like." 

" They shall be slow to speak, and eschew not 
only oaths, lies, and uncertain rumors, but likewise 
all idle, bitter scoffing, frothy, wanton words, and 
offensive gestures." 

The following brief rule has a much wider appli- 
cation than to the scholars of a college : " None 
shall pragmatically intrude or intermeddle in other 
men's affairs ; " and there is a Latin law, which was 
by no means a dead letter, though in what was called 
a dead language : " Si quis scholarium, ullam Dei et 
hujus collegii legem sive animo per verso, seu ex supi- 
na negligentia, violarit, postquam fuerit bis admoni- 
tus, si non adultus, virgis coerceatur," — "If any of 
the scholars, from a perverse mind or supine negli- 
gence, shall violate any law of God and of this Col- 
lege, after he has been twice reproved, if not adult, 
let him be scourged with rods." 

I forbear to make any application, — scholars now 
are all adults. 

I must quote one more, as a law greatly needed 
everywhere : " No scholar shall taste tobacco, unless 
permitted by the President, with the consent of their 



85 

parents or guardians, or on good reason first given 
by a physician, and then in a sober and private man- 
ner." Begging pardon of my numerous smoking 
friends, — and no man has more or better, whether 
as friends or smokers, — I can only say that, if 
the scholars " tasting tobacco " depended upon the 
permission of the President now, cigars, pipes, snuff, 
and every other form of the abomination, would 
quickly disappear from the College premises. But 
alas ! the smoke of tobacco, like the smoke of sacri- 
fice offered to idols among the ancient heathen, has 
led the generation of men astray, and the breath of 
human nostrils goes up to heaven, — if, indeed, it 

goes there at all, — eXiacrofievr] irepl kclttvw. 

I must not dwell on these characteristics of the 
past. The history of the University has been admi- 
rably written by Mr. Peirce, once Librarian, by Mr. 
Eliot, formerly the Treasurer, and, more fully, by my 
venerable predecessor, President Quincy. I will only 
remark, that every record of the proceedings of our 
ancestors in relation to the establishment, shows that 
they had large and liberal purposes. They aimed to 
educate a learned clergy ; but not that alone. The 
general education of the people was embraced in the 
scope of their enlightened plans, and they included 
in their idea of a scheme of general education the 
general principles of the highest possible education. 
The University was upreared side by side with the 
School-house, as an indispensable part of the instru- 
mentalities of civilization. They built up a state 
which they resolved should be a Christian state, 



86 

but their conception of a Christian state included 
the widest range of human learning. They were no 
fanatics of a single, narrow idea. They were men 
of piety, but not an ignorant piety. They thought 
the chief end of man was to glorify God, but they 
would glorify him by unfolding, to the highest 
possible extent, the faculties of the human soul, 
which He created in his own image. We smile as 
we read some of the formal and ceremonious require- 
ments of the earliest College laws. Manners change 
in external manifestations from age to age ; but the 
basis of good manners, respect for the rights of others, 
modest estimate of self, honorable submission to es- 
tablished laws, deference to venerable age, illustrious 
character, and official station, reverence for sacred 
things, — these are the foundation of the manners of 
gentlemen everywhere and in all times. Our ances- 
tors had this in view in their rules of order, however 
quaintly expressed, and they were wise men in re- 
quiring of the academic youth good manners as well 
as good morals, — the minor morals as well as the 
greater morals. And I am glad to say that, though 
many of the ancient ceremonial observances have 
passed away in the course of time, the spirit of our 
rules remains the same; the object, namely, to train up 
Christians and gentlemen, remains the same. I will 
venture to affirm, in no boastful spirit, but with de- 
vout thankfulness, that the object has been in good 
measure accomplished in these academic retreats. No 
one can be more conscious than I am, that young men, 
during the period of their University life, are often 



87 

restless under college rules, and take it ill that they 
are called to account for the violation of what they 
are sometimes pleased to consider petty restrictions. 
I have entire confidence in the honor of the great 
mass of students. [At this moment, the venerable 
Ex-President Quincy entered, leaning upon the arm 
of his son, and took a seat with the other three Ex- 
Presidents, on the stage. He was received with 
repeated and prolonged applause. When they ceased, 
the speaker resumed.] I was speaking, Mr. Pres- 
ident Quincy, of the faults and virtues of College 
students. No one has had a more thorough knowl- 
edge of both than you. No one can judge them 
more truly, — no one will judge them more gently. 
I was about to say that I believe no body of youno- 
men are, in the mass, more truthful and mag- 
nanimous. I have nowhere met persons more gen- 
tleman-like, better bred, better behaved, or with bet- 
ter purposes, on the whole. Yet I must say that 
those speculative gentlemen, who maintain that 
the rules of order which students are required to 
observe within the College premises are superfluous, 
know but little of human nature or student nature, 
which is a modification of the same thing. Bring 
four or five hundred persons, young, middle-aged, or 
old, learned or ignorant, pious or impious, or even 
angels, together without laws, and a superior power 
to enforce them, without rules of order, and the au- 
thority to require their observance, and, in a month, 
these quiet and studious scenes would become a pan- 
demonium. A lady may now pass, unattended, at 



88 

any hour, through the College grounds, secure from 
seeing or hearing anything to alarm or offend her. 
Mothers never need to warn their daughters not 
to cross the College precincts, day or night, for 
the spirit of the place is such that maiden delicacy 
has never been wounded, by word or act, within 
these hallowed grounds. Take off the restraints — 
which some young men think so grievous, and jus- 
tify themselves in striving to resist — for a month 
only, and the Faculty would receive a petition, unan- 
imously signed, to restore them all, if not to make 
them more rigorous than before. Law is the only 
condition of society, — much more, civilized soci- 
ety. A state where every man does what is right 
in his own eyes, that is, has no restraining power to 
check his whims and passions, is not a state in which 
progress can be made. Homer understood that well, 
when he described the lawless, one-eyed Cyclops, — 
dde/Aiarta etSco?, — and his shaggy brethren of the 
mountains and caves, — fit companions of the beasts 
that perish. The laws necessary to establishments of 
learning vary, in form and in details, according to cir- 
cumstances. I think our University owes no incon- 
siderable part of the great influence it has exercised 
upon society to the fact that, while it has remodelled 
the special forms of its laws and orders when the 
spirit of the age required, it has always enforced, 
not only the moral law in its highest sense, but 
the minor morals, which are the manners of gentle- 
men. 

There is a saying of ancient wisdom, that he best 



89 

knows how to rule who has learned how to obey. 
Submission to the law is the best discipline for the 
august task of making and administering the laws. 
To the American, more than to any other, the early 
lessons of obedience are needful. Our only security 
is in the law, and in ready and intelligent obedience 
to its sovereignty. It was a noble sentence of Plato, 
that the magistrate is not the servant of the people, 
but the servant of the LAW. An opposite view has 
taken too strong a hold upon our heady Demos. All 
men and all things are supposed to be subjected to 
the shifting gales of the popular will. But law is 
the expression of Eternal Right, beyond the reach 
of the caprice of the moment. It is, in its highest 
form, the voice of God. " The laws from Jove," — 
Oe/iLo-Tes upo? Jto'?, — is a phrase of Homer, who 
knew all the profoundest truths of human experi- 
ence. Education includes this obedience to law as 
one of its vital elements. To leave the young with- 
out this influence is more dangerous among us than 
in other countries, because in no other country has 
the citizen, on attaining his majority, so direct an 
agency in the affairs of government. The three years 
of academical freedom (the Academische Freiheit) 
of the German University are not so dangerous as 
they would be here, because the moment the Bursch 
takes his degree, he falls for life under a rigorous 
system, against which it would be vain for him to 
struggle ; his daily bread depends upon his daily 
obedience. And yet, even in Germany, a growing 
sense of its evils is beginning to manifest itself. 
12 



90 

When I explained to some of the learned men on 
the Continent the college system generally prevalent 
in America, by which students at the University 
are held to the daily performance of their duties, — 
duties which they cannot go far in neglecting, with- 
out being called to account, and that, too, during the 
four years of college study, until the young men 
reach the average age of twenty-one, — they agreed 
that our system was much better than theirs, and 
one of them, raising his hands, exclaimed, " Would to 
God we had it here ! " Our danger is routine ; theirs 
is license. On each side, the special danger is vividly 
felt, and the special advantage of the other clearly 
perceived. We sometimes give too strong a prefer- 
ence to the German University system ; they are sen- 
sitive to its peculiar evils, and perhaps exaggerate 
the advantages of ours. A system which should 
unite the excellences of both, would come as near 
perfection as a human institution can attain. 

And this leads me to a topic on which I feel it my 
duty to say a word. I am aware that some have 
fancied that the law of the State cannot cross the 
boundary-lines of the College premises, whatever- 
deeds may be perpetrated there. I shall speak my 
mind frankly, because I think the time has come 
when the subject should, once for all, and in the 
most public manner, be set in its true light. In a 
well-ordered society, when crime has been committed, 
the public law steps in to vindicate its supremacy, and 
citizens of every grade and calling stand before its 
dread tribunal on the footing of exact equality. No 



91 

fear or favor, or personal solicitations, can set aside 
its stern decree, or abate the penalties it inflicts on 
the doers of evil deeds. I know of no power in the 
College, or the State, which can make an exception 
here, or can establish a refuge for crime in these 
grounds. The Faculty, Corporation, and Overseers 
combined could not arrest, for a moment, the foot- 
steps of justice, pursuing the offender into the Col- 
lege domains. There is no right of asylum for 
wrong and violence near the altars of learning and 
religion. It is to the honor of our students, that the 
cases of offence are so few and far apart that the 
very memory of one dies out before another occurs ; 
and when one does occur, both the act and its legal 
consequences come upon them with surprise. The 
course of the law strikes them as a novelty, which 
they sometimes vehemently resent. And then we 
hear, from many quarters, that we are a paternal 
government, and that sounding phrase is considered 
argument enough to condemn the most indispensable 
course of well-considered action. A paternal govern- 
ment ! The Austrian and Russian despotisms are 
paternal governments. That cannot be what is meant. 
It is the family government, perhaps, to which they 
refer. What family government ever shielded its mem- 
bers from the penalties of violated law] What father 
ever had the power or the right to protect his son from 
the officers of justice, even if it was the paternal 
mansion itself which the reckless youth had burned 
to the ground 1 Family government ! I suppose the 
thing somewhere exists. I know the art, in former 



92 

times, was understood; but there is a figure of 
speech which the grammarians denominate cata- 
chresis, and which young men at college sometimes 
wittily employ when they call their fathers " the 
Governors," — ut lucus a non lucendo. There is a 
story told of a discussion in a social circle of students 
at Cambridge, not here, but in England, on the in- 
teresting subject of their "Governors," — when one, 
more filial than the rest, tried to check the petulance 
of his comrades by saying, iC After all, let us re- 
member that they are our fellow-creatures." That 
kind of paternal government, the government of 
those " Governors," we do not think is the best pos- 
sible government for an American University. I 
take it upon me to say, — and I say it not as a new 
thing, but as a matter both of common sense and 
common law, — that these grounds, consecrated to 
learning and piety, — these buildings, that so many 
generations have inhabited, — this property, the 
charities of our ancestors and our contemporaries, 
dedicated to science, letters, education, and to the 
worship of Almighty God, — all these enjoy the 
protection of the law. No man shall lay the hand 
of violence on these sacred trusts. High privileges, 
secured by the gifts of generous and pious men, are 
no excuse for midnight outrage and barbarous vio- 
lence. He who forgets the dignity of his position as 
a student, his obligations as a gentleman, his honor 
as a man, and sets the laws of the land at defiance, 
runs the same hazard as any other man, either of 
detection in the act, or of conviction and all its con- 



93 

sequences afterward. Crime is no more a joke within 
the College walls than it is without, and the false 
idea that it is so I denounce as a dishonest and 
corrupting sophistry, not to be tolerated for a mo- 
ment by any conscientious administration of college 
government. 

From the small beginning of the College, when, 
according to the witty verse of the President to-day, 
the Tutors had to deal with 

" The Freshman Class of one," 

it has grown to a great University, wholly in accord- 
ance with the liberal spirit in which Harvard College 
was founded. John Harvard's gift, and the contribu- 
tions of successive friends of learning in the early 
times, were noble examples, — small in amount, but 
large in proportion to their worldly means, — and 
nobly have they been followed by the Hollises, the 
Alfords, the McLeans, the Gores, the Eliots, the 
Phillipses, the Lawrences, the Appletons, the Grays, 
— time would fail to name them all, — who have 
made the establishment what it is. The State, ani- 
mated by the spirit of the Fathers, cherished the 
College, sometimes by annual appropriations, and 
sometimes by special benefactions ; but by far the 
larger part of its means, now in activity, in all its 
departments, have come from private sources, — in a 
great measure from the generous citizens of Boston, 
whose names will be forever identified with the pro- 
gress of learning in America. To the College proper 
have been successively added the Divinity School, the 



94 

Law School, the Medical School, the Lawrence Sci- 
entific School, the Botanical Garden, and the Observ- 
atory; and last, but not least in the bright array, the 
Museum of Natural History, built by private liber- 
ality, and the enlightened munificence of the Com- 
monwealth. The College, — Harvard College, — the 
germinal institution giving its corporate name to 
the whole, and the other establishments grouped 
around it, make collectively the University. What 
is a University'? It is a permanent establishment, 
in which all knowledge, all means of scientific and 
literary research, all the accumulations of study and 
experience, are gathered together. It is built, not for 
one age, but for every age ; its aim is to advance the 
human race in all that exalts and dignifies the life 
of man. The recorded wisdom, the written speech 
of every civilized nation, should be treasured on the 
shelves of its libraries ; its museums should contain 
every product of the handiwork of God ; its labora- 
tories should have every material and every instru- 
ment by which Nature can be interrogated, and the 
thoughts of the Almighty read. Men of the most 
distinguished genius, of the largest acquirements, 
should be drawn into its service. Studious and eager 
youth should find the ample page of learning ever 
unrolled before them. Withdrawn from the tumults 
of the world, and its maddening ambition, here truth 
alone should reign supreme. In the still air of de- 
lightful studies, here the growing intellect should 
ripen, undisturbed by the passions which agitate soci- 
ety. A University should bind together the students 



95 

who enter its halls in the hallowed friendship that 
grows from common pursuits of the noblest kind, and 
is nurtured by the generous sentiments native to the 
heart of uncorrupted youth. It should bind the ages 
together, by the most elevating associations that can 
act upon the finest feelings of the soul. For beneath 
its immemorial trees have walked the great and 
good of past ages, and the most illustrious of our 
contemporaries. In these apartments, they studied 
and conversed ; in these lecture-rooms, they listened 
to the learned men who guided their studies, and 
trained their unfolding faculties to the great tasks of 
life. Here first they exercised their logical reason, 
or glowing fancy, on congenial themes. Every spot 
of ground, every shady tree, every trodden path, 
every wall, turret, pinnacle, is linked to sacred 
memories, that crowd the period of hope and youth 
passed here. We recall with delight such venerable 
images, such exciting thoughts. We seem to see the 
forms of illustrious men, still haunting the places 
dear to them in the days long since gone; we lis- 
ten in imagination to the voices of the great orators, 
whose fame has filled the world ; of the poets, whose 
song has added new charms to life ; of the illustrious 
cultivators of science, who have read the laws of 
nature, or conversed with the stars : — 

" Rapt in celestial transport they, 
Yi't hither oil a glance from high 
They send of tender sympathy, 
To bless the place where on their opening soul 
First the genuine ardor stole." 



96 

It is these associations of the present and memo- 
ries of the past that create the strong attachments 
cherished by the graduates of a college for the place 
of their education. The fond feeling, that grows 
stronger with age, and kindles with a brighter flame 
as the lamp of life burns lower, is that of a child 
for its mother. If a college education added nothing 
more to the sum of human felicity than the con- 
sciousness of this tender love for Alma Mater, the 
cherishing mother of our minds, it would be among 
the best and most effective agencies for the progress 
and refinement of society. 

We are already so far removed from the beginnings, 
that the sense of antiquity steals with its softening 
influence over us, as we recall the past of Harvard 
University. Ancient visages adorn our walls, and 
look down from the canvas upon our festal assem- 
blies. We begin to count our years by centuries. 
Quaint traditions have descended to us from the 
days of the Fathers, and the hues of eld are creeping 
over our academic halls. " My own belief," says Dr. 
Arnold, " is, that our Colleges of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge are, with all their faults, the best institutions 
of the kind in the world, — at least for Englishmen." 
And so I say, " My own belief is, that our Colleges of 
Cambridge, and Amherst, and Yale, and others like 
them, are the best institutions of the kind in the world, 
— > at least for Americans." I have felt the mighty 
rush of solemn and impressive associations, that sweep 
like a tide upon the soul, at Oxford and Cambridge. 
I have paced the quadrangles, meditated among the 



97 

cloisters, read in the libraries, and wandered over 
the green lawns and soft meadows in those old Uni- 
versity towns ; I have gazed on the portraits and 
statues of their illustrious men ; I have delighted 
my sight with the architectural splendors of their 
venerable colleges, chapels, schools, and theatres. 
The effects of the education there obtained are 
wonderful and admirable. We see a body of gen- 
tlemen formed under its influence unsurpassed in 
the world ; we see a dignified and learned clergy ; 
statesmen blending the classical tastes they have 
acquired with manly abilities in practical affairs, 
adorning the drudgery of business and the details 
of official duty with the graces of the Muse. Can- 
ning and Pitt and Fox, refreshing their energies, 
exhausted in the strife of the Senate, or with the 
cares of government, by gladly drinking at the 
Pierian spring ; Brougham, writing essays on an- 
cient eloquence, and translating Demosthenes ; Car- 
lisle, filling the interval between two viceroyalties 
by studying on the spot the topography of Troy; 
Gladstone, illustrating the scholarship of the age, 
while unbending from the severe toils of arranging 
the budget and adjusting the revenues of a mighty 
empire, by writing three volumes on Homer, which 
henceforth no student's library can spare, — these 
great scholars and statesmen tell us what the high- 
est forms of English education do for the leaders 
of thought and action in our mother land. 

Again, the German Universities have been justly 
held up to our admiration, — not quite so justly 
13 



98 

to our imitation. The vast erudition of the Ger- 
man professors, their profound speculative powers, 
the gigantic contributions they have made to the 
treasures of learning-, entitle them, as a body, to 
our reverence. They have made the study of the 
German language a necessity to learned men every- 
where. The freedom of their lecture-rooms, the 
endless accumulation of books in their libraries, 
the liberality with which the stranger is allowed to 
avail himself of them, give the German Universities 
an eminent and most beneficent position in mod- 
ern culture. He who denies this because German 
speculation has sometimes lost itself in the clouds 
of mysticism, or because German rationalists have 
sometimes attempted to undermine the established 
truths of history, sacred and profane, by the sense- 
less jargon of the " mythical theory," or because a 
few German naturalists have striven to dethrone the 
Creator, and to set up in his place an inexorable 
law, as the Merimnophrontistae of the old comedy 
exalted Dinos to the place of Zeus, — he who, 
offended by these intellectual excesses, rejects the 
good there is in the profound and faithful studies 
of German scholars and philosophers, runs into a 
fanatical extreme in the opposite direction. The 
German scholars and German Universities have per- 
formed an important part, and perhaps have a still 
more important part to perform, in the progress of 
science and letters. Recognizing fully the merits 
of the English and German Universities in their 
respective spheres, I yet do not hesitate to compare 



99 

our New England system — not in a boastful, yet 
not in a deprecatory spirit — with theirs. American 
colleges have a somewhat different task to accom- 
plish from that either of the German or the English. 
The young American, passing from the university 
into the world, is seized by the current of events, 
and strongly and inevitably borne along. All too 
soon he becomes a politician, philanthropist, re- 
former. The questions which agitate the age as 
the winds lash the heaving ocean, belong not, at 
least in their party aspect, to academic life. The 
young man here must learn the principles which 
shall help him to meet them when the moment 
comes ; but he must not be absorbed in the ques- 
tions themselves, while he is gathering strength 
and ripening for the future. Let there be at least 
these short years of calm for intellectual growth. 
Let there be no premature excitement of passions, 
however laudable in themselves, by turning the 
thoughts of academic youth from liberal pursuits 
to the smoke and dust of the conflict, in this brief 
prelude, soon to be followed by the tragic compli- 
cations, the fierce emotions, the bitter, unsparing 
warfare, that rage over the field of life. Here let 
a barrier to the encroaching sea of political and 
philanthropic strife, over which it may not pass, be 
raised. Let our academic holidays be the truce of 
God, wherein all may lay aside their armor and meet 
on the common ground of the literae huma?iiores, — 
the humaner letters, as good learning was once 
beautifully called. There are places enough, times 



100 

enough, occasions enough, for the gaudia certaminis, 
— the joys of battle. For God's sake, let the din 
of war never be heard in the grove of the Academy. 
Our young American needs, more than the Euro- 
pean youth, the training that shall give him com- 
posure and self-command, — that shall give him the 
mastery of his faculties, and the habit of steady 
action. He is a citizen of a vast republic, wherein 
every man has his career to open, his fortune to 
make, his success to achieve. He feels every mo- 
ment the social or party pressure, and the weight 
of individual responsibility. These very circum- 
stances make the period in which we live one which 
tempts the young man into premature activity. He 
is allured into the busy scene when his faculties are 
but half unfolded ; his principles are yet uncer- 
tain ; his views vague ; his hopes gorgeous as the 
rainbow, and perhaps as fleeting and unsubstantial. 
His tastes are unformed, and his moral being crude 
as the unripe fruit of early summer. A solid char- 
acter is not the growth of a day; the intellectual 
faculties are not matured without long and vigorous 
culture. To refine the taste is a laborious process; 
to fortify the reasoning power with its appropriate 
discipline is an arduous undertaking ; to store the 
mind with sound and solid learning is the work of 
calm and studious years. It is the business of the 
higher education to check this fretful impatience 
which possesses us, this crude and eager haste to 
drink the cup of life which drives us onward to 
exhaust the intoxicating drafts of ambition. 



101 

By our laws a man becomes his own master at 
one-and-twenty. Our Constitution provides that the 
President of the United States must be at least 
thirty-six ; and Aristotle makes this same age the 
suitable one for a man to marry. True it is that 
one man is older, in all that constitutes true man- 
hood, at five-and-twenty, than another who has 
passed his grand climacteric. This difference comes 
partly from natural endowments ; but chiefly it is 
made by the different use of natural endowments. 
One has dawdled life away, half asleep or some- 
thing worse, till all the energies he had are made 
unfit for use. Another, fortunate in the early dis- 
cipline of parents, who knew better than to yield to 
his childish folly, — who neither spoiled his bodily 
health by indulging his appetites, nor his mental 
health by yielding to him when he shrank from 
toil, as all boys will shrink at times, — passed from 
school to college, applying the manly habits already 
formed to the appropriate labors of the place, shirk- 
ing no task, however trying, on any plea of laziness 
or dissipation. He enters life in the glory of his 
early manhood, with faculties unfolded, strengthened, 
and alert; joyously marching on his way, however 
steep and hard, to assured success ; helpful to others 
who cannot help themselves ; master of his passions ; 
no fanatic of one idea, but giving hospitable wel- 
come to all good thoughts, which ripen in his true 
and genial nature into virtuous action. Such is the 
educated youth, — such is the champion of stainless 
honor, armed with weapons of immortal temper, 



102 

whom Harvard loves to send forth into the world 
to do heroic work. The young man who would 
achieve lasting renown must learn to curb his fiery 
impulses and subdue the wandering of his impas- 
sioned thoughts ; and this the studies of the Uni- 
versity most readily help him to do. I do not say 
there is no other way of achieving this result. But 
this is the shortest and most effective way. Great 
men conquer great difficulties, and show themselves 
great in doing so ; but they remember what the 
difficulties were, and strive to put them out of the 
way of their successors. Washington and Franklin 
were not University men ; but the former, in his last 
message to Congress, recommended a University, 
for which he appropriated a part of his fortune, 
and the latter founded one. Franklin was not a 
classical scholar, but he provided the means whereby 
others should become classical scholars, and, wishing 
to make a present to our library which should sig- 
nalize his appreciation of good learning, he sent, not 
Poor Richard, but a handsome copy of Virgil. 

But if severe training be necessary for effective 
mental action, what room is left for spontaneous im- 
pulse'? some may ask, — what channel for inspiration 1 
For among those who question the ancient methods, 
we hear a great deal said about inspiration and spon- 
taneity, — pardon me the word, I never used it before. 
Without discipline, there is no spontaneous action 
worth having, — no inspiration that deserves to be 
listened to. St. Paul drew an illustration from the 
Grecian games ; let me ask the advocates of spon- 



103 

taneity what they think of the principle as applied 
to the boat-races in which our young friends have 
so much distinguished themselves. Are the careful 
diet, the early hours, the daily testing of vigor and 
skill, the total abstinence from hurtful drinks and 
food, the training of the eye, the ear, the hand, — 
are all these spontaneous actions \ Does the man 
who pulls the stroke-oar do it by spontaneity? I 
know not, — I never tried it ; but I should not like 
to pull against such a man with all the spontaneity 
I could muster. 

The most beggarly ballad-singer that earns his 
daily bread by twanging his harp and singing his 
poor old songs at cottage doors, has won his skill 
of hand and voice and style by long and persist- 
ent training. The immortal verse of Homer was 
no careless outpouring of sudden impulse. We 
may be sure that the unapproachable perfection of 
his transcendent composition was the result of lono- 
and careful cultivation. It is true that he inherited 
a language formed under the happiest influences of 
nature, by a race who possessed a manly vigor and 
an exquisite susceptibility to the beauty of sound 
and form. The Ionic Greek, which he learned from 
his mother's lips, was the most wonderful instru- 
ment on which poet ever played. For every mood 
of man's changing mind, for every affection of the 
heart, for every form of outward nature, it possessed 
that peculiar felicity of expression which places the 
things described directly before the hearer. And 
Homer inherited from his birth each gift and grace 



104 



with which the gods have ever crowned their dar- 
lings. His vigilant eye let no object, great or small, 
escape its lightning glance : his ear drank in the 
melodies of nature and art ; his exquisitely-strung 
nerves vibrated to every breath of heaven, every 
voice of passion, every stirring impulse of the soul. 
But he stored his mind with all the knowledge of 
his age. He travelled over the ancient Grecian 
world, and, with a keenness of observation which no 
naturalist of modern times has ever surpassed, he 
noted the phenomena of Nature on the bosom of the 
stormy sea, on the resounding shore, in the silence of 
the star-lit night, at the rising of the sun, at the 
setting of the Pleiades. And when the inspiration 
came upon him, and his thoughts voluntarily moved 
harmonious numbers, the thought and knowledge 
and discipline were there ; the listening throngs at 
the Ionian festivals knew that they stood in the pres- 
ence of the greatest creative intellect, — the wisest of 
men, — the favorite of the heavenly powers. From 
that clay to this the law has remained the same. The 
gods have placed labor before excellence, and the 
condition is inexorably enforced, the price sternly 
exacted. The superiority of genius is not only a 
superiority of natural endowment, but a force of will 
and a faculty of toil, that bring all natural endow- 
ments into the highest and the most efficient activity. 
The proper objects of a University are twofold. 
First, educating young men to the highest efficiency 
of their intellectual faculties, and to the noblest cul- 
ture of their moral and religious natures. To accom- 



105 

plisli this end, both experience and reason have 
shown that the study of the classical languages of 
antiquity, — the Greek and Latin, — the mathemat- 
ics, and the physical sciences, and intellectual philos- 
ophy, are the best means. Other sciences and other 
departments of literature are added, according to 
time, taste, and inclination, for practical utility and 
literary accomplishment. Instruction in the modern 
languages is provided, as they are the keys to the 
precious treasures of literature, in which the culti- 
vated nations of Europe have embodied their best 
thoughts. The two great languages of antiquity 
have been taken as the basis of literary culture ; 
first, because geographically they stand in a central 
position in the long line of Indo-European tongues, 
and secondly, because, as instruments for the expres- 
sion of thought, they rose, in the long succession of 
centuries, to the highest point of perfection. Speech, 
in itself, is one of the grandest and most beautiful 
objects of study. Taking it in all its relations and 
forms, we may call it the chief distinction of man. 
It is one of the divinest miracles of our being. 
When we speak, we set in motion an organism 
framed with inexpressible skill, by the hand of the 
Almighty Creator. What curious and subtile adapta- 
tions have been contrived to make the act of speech 
not only possible, but easy, — so easy, and so natu- 
ral, that we never pause to reflect upon the wonder 
of the phenomenon. The articulating organs, so ex- 
quisitely constructed and adjusted ; the elastic air, 
that serves so many other beneficent purposes in the 
14 



106 

economy of the universe; the intellect, created, as 
all science shows, in the image of the Divine mind, 
transmitting its commands from the brain, where it 
sits enthroned like a god, along the speeding nerves 
to its servants, the articulating organs; the im- 
pulse, moving on the wings of the breeze, sweeping 
through intervening space, knocking at the porches 
of the ear, and delivering the message — a bodiless 
thought — to another kindred mind ; — how com- 
monplace, yet how mysterious, how divine ! No 
wonder that Rhenius, a missionary in the East, in the 
Preface to his Tamil Grammar, exclaims, " To God, 
the Eternal and Almighty Jehovah, and Author of 
speech, be glory for ever and ever." But these two 
languages are not only the perfection of the forms of 
speech ; they contain the most admirable composi- 
tions in every species of literature, and they stand in 
point of time also at the head of that European civil- 
ization to which we belong. Nothing can change the 
past ; the position they occupy, the influence they have 
exercised over the course of thought and the forms of 
expression in literature, are immutable facts. What- 
ever progress the nations may make in knowledge 
and the diffusion of intellectual culture among the 
people, the Greek and Roman writers will hold their 
place as the venerable teachers of the European world. 
You cannot cut off the fountain-head ; you cannot 
stop the stream. To the end of time the great 
classic authors of Greece and Rome will be the 
models of all that is noble in expression, elegant in 
style, chastened in taste. Doubtless the human race 



107 

advance in general knowledge and culture, and in 
command over the facts of nature and the laws of 
dynamics, as they move on through the ages. But 
the twin peaks of Parnassus still rise, and only one 
poet soars to the side of Homer. The Bema stands 
silent and solitary in Athens, and no orator has 
ascended its steps and plucked the crown from the 
brow of Demosthenes. The Cephissus and the Ilis- 
sus listened to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle ; 
but no modern Cephissus and Ilissus so haunt the 
memories of cultivated thinkers as these slender 
streamlets. He would be a bold man who asserted 
that any dramatic poet has surpassed, or that more 
than one have equalled, JEschylus and Sophocles. 
There have been many more populous and wealthy 
cities than Athens, but only one Athens has illus- 
trated the history of man, — there has been but one 
Athens in the world. Time has not dimmed her 
ancient glories ; her schools still school mankind ; 
her language is the language of letters, of art, of sci- 
ence. There has been but one Acropolis, over which 
the virgin goddess of wisdom kept watch and ward 
with spear and shield. There has been but one 
Parthenon, built by the genius of Architecture, 
and adorned with the unapproachable perfections of 
Phidian statues ; and there it rises in the pathetic 
beauty of decay, kindling in the blaze of the noon- 
day sun, or softly gleaming under the indescribable 
loveliness of the full moon of Attica. 

Great moralists have taught the lessons of wisdom 
and goodness in every generation of men ; but only 



108 

the Son of God rose to diviner strains than Socrates, 
whose teachings of the obligations of duty, the im- 
mortality of the soul, the forgiveness of injuries, the 
certainty of judgment to come, sanctify the rocky 
chamber where he held those dialogues recorded by 
the most beloved of his disciples, and where, when 
the great discussion ended, and the setting sun was 
still lighting the hill of Mars, Hymettus, Lycabettus, 
and the Acropolis with its unequalled glories, he 
died a martyr's death, because he would not disobey 
his country's laws. 

A liberal education, a university education, aims 
to train the mind in these high studies, to make it 
familiar with these inspiring examples, to refine the 
taste, exercise the judgment, soften the heart, by 
these humanizing arts. I have dwelt a few moments 
on this department of university education, partly, I 
suppose, because the studies of my life have been 
more especially consecrated to its cultivation; but 
partly also because the utility of these pursuits, and 
their fitness to hold the conspicuous place which our 
system assigns them, have been vehemently ques- 
tioned. The discipline of the exact sciences and 
their practical usefulness, the importance of cultivat- 
ing the powers of observation, and guarding against 
the illusions of the senses, the value of a careful 
initiation into the philosophy of the mind, and the 
political sciences, no man in his senses ever denied. 

I believe the education founded on the studies of 
which I have spoken, is the best for a young man 
considered as a rational being; and if best for a 



109 

young man as a rational being, it is also the best 
preparation he can have for any special department 
of life. He will not only be the better lawyer, clergy- 
man, physician, for having had it, but he will be the 
better citizen, the better merchant, the better banker, 
the better everything. The late Colonel Perkins once 
told me, that if he were then in active life, (he was at 
a very advanced age at the time,) and had to choose 
for his counting-house between two young men, of 
equal natural abilities, of equal excellence of char- 
acter, the one having received a college education, 
with no special preparation for business, the other 
with a good school education and the most careful 
training in book-keeping and the other arts which 
have a special bearing on commercial pursuits, he 
should prefer the college man. The ground of judg- 
ment taken by that eminent and venerable merchant 
was, that the university man could easily master the 
details of the business, with the general culture his 
education had given him, so as to be equal to his 
rival in that special thing ; and that done, he would 
always be, in other respects, the superior. And I 
have been told by an eminent professor of natural 
science, who formerly belonged to a foreign univer- 
sity into which came pupils from the gymnasia, 
where a classical course was required, and others 
from the so-called real schools, where the studies 
were exclusively practical and scientific, that invaria- 
bly the classical men made the most rapid progress 
in the study of the natural sciences, for which the 
preparation of the others, in a superficial view, would 



110 

be supposed to have best qualified them. The rea- 
son was the same as that given by the merchant: 
that the gymnasia furnished a more complete exer- 
cise of the intellectual powers, and he who had been 
subjected to it was better fitted for any special de- 
partment in the university. I think these views are 
sound and philosophical ; and while I do not claim 
that a university education is essential to professional 
pursuits, practical business, or public life, I would 
strongly urge it upon every young man looking for- 
ward to either of these careers, who can command 
the time and the pecuniary means. Our assemblage 
of establishments adapt themselves, however, to the 
various conditions and objects of men. We do not 
require a young man to pass the undergraduate de- 
partment in order to enter the scientific or profes- 
sional schools, because we know that many who will 
greatly profit by these schools cannot spare the time 
required by the college ; yet I have not the slightest 
doubt that in every one of these cases a previous 
college course would in after life prove to be an ines- 
timable blessing. I should be glad to illustrate this 
topic at greater length, but passing time warns me 
that I must forbear. 

Socrates deemed himself happy that he was about 
to migrate after death to a blessed region, where he 
should meet and converse with the souls of Homel- 
and Hesiocl, and other good and famous men. The 
scholar now may enjoy the anticipated happiness of 
Socrates. He may read the very words, glow with 
the very thoughts, fill his memory with the very im- 



Ill 

ages, that revolved in the capacious genius of the old 
Ionian singer, whose undying verse still reproduces 
the Hellespontine shore, still echoes with the multitu- 
dinous plashing of the sea, and repeoples with heroic 
forms the plain of Troy, over whose silent fields the 
Simois and Scamander steal their languid way, as 
the traveller, Iliad in hand, sweeps along the spark- 
ling waters, with Ida, Gargarus, and the Mysian 
Mountains in sight, while Tenedos, and Imbros, and 
Samothrace, rich with poetical memories, flash like 
gems on the bosom of the iEgean deep. An English 
gentleman, Mr. Calvert, hospitable and generous like 
Axylus of old, owns the immortal plain, and is re- 
claiming it with British capital from the exhaustion 
of centuries of barbaric possession. But the genius 
of Homer holds it by an older title, recognized as 
inalienable by the whole educated world ; and the 
scholar who sails its neighboring waters and treads 
its shores is the intellectual guest of him who has 
owned it by the right of song for more than three 
thousand years. Is it not something, too, to ascend 
the Bema, — that illustrious rock, — and recall the 
majestic words of Demosthenes, which entranced the 
souls of his countrymen, and kept the arms of 
Philip and Alexander for twenty years at bay, — the 
very words of matchless grace and resistless force 
wherein the master's fiery inspiration flowed'? Is 
it not something to repeat, under the shade of the 
Morian trees, the very phrases in which Plato deliv- 
ered his divine philosophy to his disciples, while the 
breezes played among the weird old olive groves, 



112 

sacred to Athene, and the silvery waters of the 
Cephissus went murmuring- by, more than two thou- 
sand years ago? When Cicero visited Athens, he 
turned aside at the Peiraic gate and passed up the 
plain to the colonnaded walks of the Academy, 
that he might refresh his soul with the exalting 
associations of the spot, even before he beheld the 
wonders of art that crowned the Acropolis, or con- 
versed with the accomplished men who in that age 
still crowded the gardens, the schools, the Leschae, 
and the porticos. To the scholar of the present day 
the enjoyment is more exquisite, the delight of such 
associations more intense. 

But I must tear myself away from these classic 
memories, that recall moments that were eras in my 
intellectual life, — hours, happy hours, too quickly 
fled. 

I have said that the object of a university was 
partly to educate the young, — the picked and chosen 
youth — the jeunesse doree — of the country; but it 
is also in part the duty of the Professors to add to 
the literature and science of their respective depart- 
ments. The university that fails to do this fails in 
an essential portion of its proper business. For the 
men of Harvard, I proudly and gratefully appeal to 
the judgment of the world. Natural and mathemati- 
cal science, law, philosophy, poetry, are daily receiv- 
ing important accessions from the heads and hands 
of our Professors. Leading works in all the prov- 
inces of the intellectual domain might be enumerated, 
which have been produced by them within the last 



113 

ten years. But in this presence I forbear. In the 
other branches of academic duty, the all-important 
question is, Does the training of Harvard rear up a 
race of men, — high-minded men'? Public and pri- 
vate munificence has built and filled yonder Library 
and these learned halls. The same generous spirit 
has endowed these professorships. Have the objects 
of all these noble endowments and costly sacrifices 
been attained? Are all these diligent labors, these 
watchful cares, daily and nightly exercised by the 
academic body, rewarded by the bright accomplish- 
ments and honorable characters of the young men 
who annually go forth from these ancient halls into 
the busy world? If not, let these ancient halls 
crumble to the earth ; let yonder noble library be 
scattered or burned by invading barbarians ; let 
yonder museum, which now contains in its ample 
spaces an organic world, be levelled brick by brick, 
and the great naturalist who has gathered its treas- 
ures from every quarter of the earth return to 
the land whose great loss we have thought our 
exceeding gain in his coming. But no ; the halls, 
libraries, museums, shall stand, and their means of 
progress and utility shall be indefinitely enlarged. 
The naturalist shall stay where he is. There is no 
end to the public and private blessings they confer 
under his inspiring genius. Proudly and gratefully 
I go before the world with these graduates of Har- 
vard, — from the noble man who stands at the head 
of the long catalogue of illustrious living names, to 
the class that received their diplomas yesterday. 
15 



114 

There are some who doubt the wisdom of our 
system and the fitness of our discipline, but behold 
the results. I make no boastful comparisons, but 
wherever I meet a Cambridge man I know that I 
am in the society of a gentleman. I think I have 
studied the Cambridge student long enough to un- 
derstand his qualities. I know that he sometimes 
cherishes fantastic and paradoxical theories of his 
own rights, especially as against the requirements of 
the Faculty; I am aware that he sometimes labors 
under strange delusions as to the insidious designs 
of tutors and proctors against his peace and dig- 
nity, for I have been a tutor myself; but I doubt 
if the faults of students are as great as those that 
other persons of the same age would exhibit, if as- 
sembled in equal numbers, and, like them, partially 
removed from the influences of general society. I am 
convinced that they have better safeguards against 
serious moral dangers than other young men enjoy. 
Nowhere, I think, is the influence of high character 
more powerful or pervading. I know of no form of 
society where, with the greatest inequality of social 
condition and of wealth, such absolute justice is done 
to merit. Rich and poor, country boys and city boys, 
candidates well prepared and candidates ill prepared, 
here come together. In spite of the errors of opinion 
and conduct which sometimes, in moments of excite- 
ment, they exhibit in their bearing towards the au- 
thorities under which they are placed, in their con- 
duct toward each other, in the honors they award to 
each other, I firmly believe that no society of men 



115 

in the world, young or old, are governed by a more 
absolute sense of perfect and impartial justice. 

We used to hear in former times of charity schol- 
ars. Young men destitute of this world's goods, but 
rich in hope and aspirations, were above the false 
pride of refusing to perforin services which the more 
fastidious tone of our day would perhaps call menial, 
to earn thereby money to pay, in whole or in part, 
the cost of their education. The rich classmates of 
such a scholar never made him feel, by scornful look, 
or haughty manner, or stinging allusion, the sense 
of inequality. The same student who, in Commons 
Hall, waited upon his wealthier classmates, or rang 
the morning bell, or kindled the fire in the reci- 
tation-room, presided in the evening over one of the 
literary societies, into which the rich young man 
felt himself honored to be admitted as a common 
member. Hand inexpertus Joquor. This generous 
principle of scholarly association, making a student's 
position in the most important respects dependent 
upon what he is, and not upon what he has, is a 
noble characteristic of college life. But the poor 
scholars are not the only charity scholars. Rich 
and poor are alike the beneficiaries of the founders 
and benefactors of the University. In the eye of 
the law, the college is only a great charity, and 
the permanency of its rights, privileges, and powers 
stands upon this ground alone. The teaching of 
the learned professors, the use of these museums 
and libraries, the countless benefits of a residence 
here, are procured for rich and poor alike, — from 



116 

what or by whom'? Not from the charges paid in 
term-bills, but from the well-directed charities of 
past generations and the present. These precious 
opportunities, which money cannot purchase, are 
open to the richest as well as the poorest, for half 
the sum paid for tuition at some of our private 
schools. The wealthiest scholar is dependent on 
charity for seven eighths of what his education 
costs, and the poorest only for a trifle more. The 
difference between the richest and the poorest this 
year has been but thirty dollars. Every student 
who has ever been graduated at this University, 
whether he waited at table, made fires, rang bells, 
kept monitors' bills, or clothed himself in purple 
and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day, 
has been a charity student, nothing more. 

The general type of character formed under these 
varied and contrasted influences is one in which 
truth, honor, generous feeling, brotherly kindness, 
most generally and permanently prevail. We meet 
it in all the walks of life, in practical affairs, in 
the professions, in church, in state. It is not often 
found in its highest development, but when it is, 
how lovely does it rise before us ! Purity, manli- 
ness, and ardent youth harmonize well together. 
The union of these high qualities with the grace- 
fulness of opening life and glowing manhood, is 
everywhere a lovely spectacle, which the gods may 
contemplate witli delight. Nowhere is it lovelier 
or more beloved than among its kindred youth at 
college. Have you not watched such a young man 



117 

in his daily walk? Refined in manners, gentle in 
bearing, quiet in speech, never uttering a coarse 
word or a doubtful jest, he moves like the angel 
of Milton, severe in youthful beauty. He is devout 
and religious without ostentation, but without the 
dread of showing that he is religious on all fitting 
occasions. The harmony of his life is felt by the 
lightest of his companions. Do his fellow-students 
doubt his virtue, sneer at his purity, scorn his gen- 
tleness \ He who thinks so greatly misjudges their 
generous natures. In his calm and saintly presence 
vice shrinks abashed, and tries to hide her ugliness ; 
the loose phrase and suggestive song die away upon 
shamed and silenced lips. His speech is precious 
as gold ; his opinion sways like the sentence of a 
sage; his father's pride, his mother's joy, the idol 
of his sister's heart, — is this being a dream of 
fancy % God forbid. I seem to see him now, 
standing in bodily presence before me. Alas ! he 
sleeps in yonder city of the dead. His memory, 
crowned with amaranthine virtues, is the viewless 
presence in which he lives among us. 

Gentlemen, it is high time for me to close. 
God grant that we may all work together for the 
prosperity of the common mother of our minds. 
God grant that these young men, who come up 
year by year, may under the influences of the place 
be strengthened for every good word and work. 
If I may be thought, hereafter, to have wrought 
in some humble measure toward this consumma- 
tion, — if I may, in some humble measure, have 



118 

contributed to the enlargement of the bounds of 
science, the diffusion of a literary taste, the estab- 
lishment of liberal and enlightened sentiments, the 
elevation of the standard of Christian and scholarly 
character, the strengthening of the bonds of patri- 
otic devotion to the honor and glory of our com- 
mon country among the successive classes, drawn 
from many and distant States, — if by the conse- 
cration of the remainder of my life to these objects, 
I shall close my career of service here with the 
consciousness of having advanced these high aims, 
to which the University, if faithful to itself, must 
ever aspire, that will be renown enough. 



THE DINNER 



ASSOCIATION OE THE ALUMNI 



THE DINNER. 



The procession re-formed at Gore Hall, soon after the 
exercises were finished at the Church, and proceeded to 
Harvard Hall to the dinner. The capacity of the room 
was severely tested by the six hundred persons who were 
present. Dr. Holmes, Vice-President of the Association 
of Alumni, presided, having President Felton and two 
ex-Presidents, the Hon. Edward Everett and Dr. Walker, 
on his right, and Dr. Osgood, Governor Banks, and Chief 
Justice Shaw on his left. A blessing was asked by the Rev. 
Chandler Robbins, and the company dined. After this, the 
Musical Society of the Alumni sang, " Non nobis, Domine," 
and Dr. Holmes addressed the company as follows : — 

" Brothers, by the side of her who is mother of us all, 
and friends, whom she welcomes as her own children ! 

" The older sons of our common parent, who should have 
greeted you from this chair of office, being for different 
reasons absent, it has become my duty to half fill the place 
of these honored but truant children, to the best of my 
inability. A most grateful office, so far as the expression of 
kind feelings is concerned ; an undesired duty if I look to 
the comparisons you must draw between the government 
of the association existing de jure, and its government tie 
facto. Your President (Hon. R. C. Winthrop) so graces 
every assembly which he visits, by his presence, his dignity, 
his suavity, his art of ruling, whether it be the council of a 
16 



122 

Nation, the legislature of a State, or the lively democracy 
of a Dinner-table, that, when he enters a meeting like this, 
it seems as if the chairs stood back of their own will to let 
him pass to the head of the board, and the table itself, that 
most intelligent of quadrupeds, the half-reasoning mahog- 
any, tipped him a spontaneous welcome to its highest scat, 
and of itself rapped the assembly to order. Your first 
Vice-President (Mr. Charles Francis Adams), whose name 
and growing fame you know so much better than his bodily 
presentment, has not been able to gratify your eyes and 
cars by showing you the lineaments and stirring you with 
the tones inherited from men who made their country or 
shaped its destinies. You and I have no choice, therefore, 
and I must submit to stand in this place of eminence as a 
speaker, instead of sitting a happy listener with my friends 
and classmates on the broader platform beneath. Through 
my lips must flow the gracious welcome of this auspicious 
day, which brings us all together in this family temple, 
under the benignant smile of our household divinities, 
around the ancient altar fragrant with the incense of our 
grateful memories. 

" This festival is always a joyous occasion. It reassem- 
bles a scattered family, without making any distinction ex- 
cept that which age establishes, — an aristocracy of silver 
hairs, which all inherit in their turn, and none is too eager 
to anticipate. In the great world outside there are and 
must be differences of lot and position ; one has been fortu- 
nate, another, toiling as nobly, perhaps, has fallen in with 
adverse currents ; one has become famous, his name stares 
in great letters from the handbills of the drama of his gen- 
eration, another lurks in small type among the supernu- 
meraries. But here we stand in one unbroken row of 
brotherhood. No symbol establishes a hierarchy that di- 
vides one from the other; every name which has passed 
into our golden book, the Triennial Catalogue, is illumi- 



123 

nated and emblazoned in our remembrance and affection 
with the purple and sunshine of our common Mother's 
hallowed past and hopeful future. 

" "We have at this time a twofold reason for welcoming 
the return of our day of festive meeting. The old chair 
of office, against whose uneasy knobs have rested so many 
well-compacted spines, whose uncushioned arms have em- 
braced so many stately forms, over whose inheritance of 
cares and toils have ached so many ample brows, is filled 
once more with a goodly armful of scholarship, experience, 
and fidelity. 

" The President never dies. Our precious Mother must 
not be left too long a widow, for the most urgent of reasons. 
We talk so much about her maternity, that we are apt to 
overlook the fact that a responsible Father is as necessary 
to the good name of a well-ordered college, as to that of a 
well-regulated household. 

" As children of the College, our thoughts naturally cen- 
tre on the fact that she has this day put off the weeds of her 
nominal widowhood, and stands before us radiant in the 
adornment of her new espousals. You will not murmur, 
that, without debating questions of precedence, we turn 
our eyes upon the new head of the family, to whom our 
younger brothers are to look as their guide and counsellor, 
as we hope and trust through many long and prosperous 
years. 

" Brothers of the Association of the Alumni ! Our own 
existence as a society is so bound up with that of the Col- 
lege whose seal is upon our foreheads, that every blessing 
we invoke on our parent's head, returns like the dew of 
Heaven upon our own. So closely is the welfare of our 
beloved Mother knitted to that of her chief counsellor and 
official consort, that in honoring him we honor her under 
whose roof we are gathered, at whose breasts we have been 
nurtured, whose fair fame is our glory, whose prosperity is 



124 

our success, whose lease of long life is the charter of our 
own perpetuity. 

" I propose the health of the President of Harvard Uni- 
versity. We greet our brother as the happy father of a 
long line of future Alumni." 

President Felton, on rising to respond, was received with 
three cheers and warm applause. 

" Mr. President, — I thank you for the pleasant manner 
in which you have referred to me. I rise only to offer my 
acknowledgments for the greetings which I have had here 
and elsewhere, to-day. It is true, the morning opened 
with stormy scenes in nature ; but storms in nature clear 
the air, and now we are in the enjoyment of unclouded 
sunshine. I have occupied too much time of this assem- 
bly, in another place, to feel justified in making you a 
speech now, if I, had the physical strength to do so. You 
are aware, Sir, that it is a warm day, but not by the con- 
clusive experience of it that I have had. I have had my 
share of both time and labor already. I thank you, breth- 
ren, one and all, for the cordial greeting you have extended 
to me, I thank you for the friendly manner in which you 
received what I said to-day, — said sincerely and earnestly, 
though in a somewhat loose and unfinished form. I can 
only add, that, in my future labors here, I intend to be 
guided by the principles which I endeavored to expound, 
because they are principles not adopted for the moment, 
but deduced from the experience of more than thirty years 
of college life, and I, at least, have no doubt of their 
soundness in the main, though I am aware that different 
minds look upon the same subject with different views. 
Paying all respect to every difference of opinion, and not 
expecting that my opinions will be adopted without discus- 
sion and debate, and perhaps, at times, opposition from the 
young, and even — what is more formidable still — disap- 



125 

probation from the old ; yet, when I am satisfied from 
my own reason and experience, I shall not be deterred 
from carrying them into execution so far as depends on 
me. No one, I think, can be more sensitive than I am to 
the good opinion, or more desirous to gain the friendly 
regard, of those who have been educated in these same 
academic- shades with me, — too sensitive, perhaps, for my 
own happiness ; bat one thing I can promise, that no 
unconscientious compliance with the prejudice of the mo- 
ment, or the whim of the moment, shall turn me from the 
straightforward course of duty which, when I accepted this 
place, I resolved to enter upon. 

" I take this occasion to return my thanks to the Governor 
of the Commonwealth for the manner in which he spoke of 
the educational institutions of the State. I know, from 
my association with him on the Board of Education, that 
during his official period he has taken an active and most 
enlightened interest in them all, from the University 
down to the common school. I thank the Orator of the 
Alumni for the genial words which he has addressed to 
me. Peculiarly pleasant to me was it to listen to his 
voice upon this occasion, for he is an old friend and a 
cherished pupil ; and, though much younger than I, one 
with whom I have always maintained the most agreeable 
relations of literary intercourse and personal friendship. 
My thanks are especially due to the great body of educated 
gentlemen who have received with so much kindness what I 
had to say, — more than I expected, far more. To one and 
all I offer my sincerest and most deep-felt acknowledgments. 

" I might perhaps fairly ask some indulgence for the im- 
perfections of my performance. During the past term I 
have been crowded with double duties as Professor and 
President. I have had the Commencement Latin to 
master, and that, you know, gentlemen, is not, in all its 
forms and phrases, quite Ciceronian. The closing term of 



126 

the year is always laborious for students, Professors, and 
President, and I have had my full share of toil. Be- 
sides the multiplying details of proper college work, I 
have had to preside over the Visitation of the Theological 
School, I have had to attend the meetings for the examina- 
tion and admission of the largest class that has ever been 
offered for the University, — representing a larger number 
of States, I believe, than any class that has ever entered 
here before. In the midst of all these cares I have had to 
prepare my address for to-day. I think I may, therefore, 
claim a merciful construction. I have come to the conclu- 
sion, that, if I survive the present week, I am good for at 
least fifty years to come." 

The President. — "To lead the procession of our breth- 
ren as the oldest graduate is a title to our respect and cour- 
tesy. To have performed long and faithfully the duties of 
the head of an institution like this University is of itself 
a claim to our grateful recognition. To have taken a part 
during two generations in the councils of national or mu- 
nicipal government, is to have been twice a citizen, and to 
merit twofold honors. When to the crown of patriarchal 
years is added the recollection of a double lifetime given to 
the interests of liberal education, and to the cause of good 
government, in the city and in the republic, the common 
tribute of respect is too languid for the glow of our grati- 
tude, and we rise in spontaneous concert at the name of 
Josiah Quincy." 

The entire company rose and gave cheer on cheer for 
Quincy, and, after the band had played a waltz, the Har- 
vard Club sang Horace's Ode, " Integer Vitae." 

The Peesident. — " We are honored by the presence of 
the Chief Magistrate of the Commonwealth of Massachu- 
setts. The debt which scholars owe to statesmen can only 



127 

be repaid in words ; would that they were always golden 
ones ! What English monarch's name is so often upon Eng- 
lish lips as that of him who founded the school of Eton, — 

' Where grateful Science still adores 
Her Henry's holy shade 1 ' 

I speak the general sense of our men of science and letters 
when I say that our distinguished Chief Magistrate could 
not have shown a more filial kindness for this Mother of 
ours, if she had held him in her lap and counted him, as 
she certainly would have done, in her list of " first schol- 
ars." I propose the health of his Excellency, Governor 
Banks ; he has taken the State for his college, and stands 
at the head of his class." 
Music, — " Hail to the Chief." 

The Governor responded as follows : — 

" Mr. President and Gentlemen, — I could not but feel 
sensibly the honor you have conferred upon me by the 
sentiment which has been so kindly received. I am afraid 
that, if I take too literally the words in which it has been 
given by the distinguished President, some other gentle- 
man may remind me in his own words, that the class of 
which he speaks is that same old 'Freshman Class of one.'' 
I am sure, Sir, that any place that he assigns a man is a 
good one for the person for whom it is assigned. As for 
the Governors, Sir, they belong to that class of evils of 
which we can never have but one at a time. 

" I am certainly, Sir, delighted to find the Alumni of 
Harvard University in so joyous a mood. Indeed, I did 
not know that she had had any grief at all, until I heard it 
from the President, or that she had been in widowhood for 
any considerable length of time. When I saw her last, she 
had an excellent husband, and I should like to know under 
what laws she has taken the liberty to let him go from her ? 
The Commonwealth has, indeed, an interest, not only in 



128 

the prosperity of the institution, hut in the general good- 
feeling and enjoyment with which her anniversaries are 
celebrated. Indeed, I do not know anything that does the 
Commonwealth a greater service than a little good-humor. 
And if there is any citizen that we could not spare from 
the Commonwealth, it is the gentleman who sits at my 
right (Dr. Holmes), because he gives us so many good 
hits that we enjoy. Sometimes I think, Sir, we have a 
little too much wisdom in this Commonwealth, — that it 
would be better if we knew a little less and enjoyed our- 
selves a little more. There is a soberness that incrusts 
our people, exceedingly becoming on grave occasions ; but 
there are a great many opportunities when we could do 
without it very well indeed. And I am happy to say, that 
this is one of those occasions, and also, that I have never 
seen six hundred faces looking so well as these that are 
before me. 

. " I really wish, Sir, I had been a graduate of this Univer- 
sity. It seems to me that I must have had a good time. 
And I well remember, Sir, when I was quite young, — 
younger, almost, than I like to think, — how many times I 
came down from the little town where I lived, and walked 
in the shade of the trees, and heard the voices of the young 
men that were then here, and wished that I might have 
been one of them. It does not matter, Sir, what comes to 
a man in after life, nor how great his success may be, — I 
can say it from my heart and from my experience, — there 
is nothing in the world that will take the place of the dis- 
cipline and training that young men can have in a Uni- 
versity like this. I wish that every son of the Common- 
wealth might have the privileges of this institution, that he 
might enjoy its advantages, and once a year look as happy, 
gentlemen, as you are looking to-day. 

" There is something more in the matter of education 
than we are accustomed to think. I do not know why it 



129 

is, but the philosophy of this country seems to have run in 
a settled current of opinion, that leaves out of considera- 
tion the character of men. We rely upon institutions, — 
some of us upon what we call abstract principles, but 
" institutions " is the great idea for us. If we can have an 
institution for everything, we don't want anything else. 
There is the ballot, — that is a great institution ; there is 
the jury, — that is another great institution; and there is 
this or that great organism in our system of government, 
which we highly prize ; and we say that if the people of 
France, of Russia, of Austria, of Italy, could only have the 
advantage of our institutions, they would have a govern- 
ment as perfect as that which we possess. But to me, Mr. 
President, it seems that, above all institutions, a good gov- 
ernment requires men. And though institutions may be 
conveniences for good and great men, there can be no 
government, and no security for individual or public rights, 
where there is nothing but institutions ; and where there 
are true and great and good men there will be good gov- 
ernment, and security for public and private right, whether 
or not there exist any institutions whatever. And my 
heart feels gladdened when I see that there is undoubtedly 
aroused attention, on the part of the people of the Common- 
wealth and the country, to the necessity of a more thorough 
and manly culture than we have enjoyed, — not principally, 
perhaps, for the mind, but as much or more for the body, 
and recognizing the fact that out of the strength of the 
body, concurrent with the action of the brain, and the prin- 
ciples prompted by this symmetrical education, there is a 
security for the rights of the public, whether men be poor 
or rich, whether they be weak or strong. And I give you, 
Sir,— 

" Prosperity to this and every other institution on the 
face of the earth, which is engaged in the work of creating 
men." 

17 



130 

The President gave the next regular toast : — 

"The Orator of the Alumni, — We have this day reaped 
a twofold pleasure from his presence, in ' The Graduate's 
Return,' as spoken and as acted in his own person." 

Music, " Luce Serene," by the Harvard Club. 

Rev. Dr. Osgood responded as follows : — 

" Mr. President, — One way of serving our friends is to 
speak for them when asked ; another way, and I think it is 
the much better way, is to hold our tongue. Now I claim 
that the Alumni ought to be content with what I have done 
for them, for I have not only spoken three quarters of an 
hour, but I have omitted, positively, half an hour of my 
discourse. Now the Alumni have on their record various 
donations I remember, and among other things, a pewter 
mug valued at six shillings. Perhaps holding my tongue 
for half an hour might be entered upon the books as work, 
and credited to some similar amount. 

" But, Sir, it would be wrong for me to fail to renew the 
fellowship of former days, and to express the great satisfac- 
tion which the returning graduate feels, not only in finding 
so many persons who are congenial friends, but in finding 
so many persons of diverse feelings, in finding that the list 
of our graduates is made up of so many materials, and that 
the sons of Harvard are united, — and united, powerful, 
because they are willing to accept the varying tendencies 
of a great many minds, in that enlarged spirit which be- 
comes educated men. Now, some persons look upon differ- 
ence as a ground of discord, and it may be that some of the 
young Alumni suppose, because certain of the elder gradu- 
ates do not think exactly as they do, that the elder gradu- 
ates ought to be expurgated from the Alumni catalogue ; 
whereas the young graduates need the elder men, and per- 
haps the elder graduates need the younger men. I don't 



131 

know any better symbol of the fellowship of our Harvard 
men than that free speech which is now flowing so gener- 
ously here. I read, in a work on ' The Philosophy of the 
Fine Arts,' recently issued from the press, that the first of 
the fine arts is prose speech, — because that, more than the 
plastic arts, more than architecture, painting, and sculp- 
ture, more than the other vocal arts, more than music and 
poetry, is as large as the world of the free spirit itself. 
I believe the diction of Harvard, drawn from the wells of 
English pure and undefiled, is an illustration of this truth. 
The prose of Harvard has expressed all the generous senti- 
ments that Harvard accepts, and has pointed out the modes 
of generous fellowship which Harvard ought to urge. 

" We are proud, some of us who live in our city, in be- 
ing visited by various members of the Alumni. Sometimes 
the young and enthusiastic politician, fresh from Congress, 
comes to address us, and the whole city hangs upon his lips, 
remembering that he has repelled the weapons of barbar- 
ism with the weapons of civilization. Then we are visited 
by one of our elder brethren who charms us all with his 
eloquence ; and no man in America draws so many sensi- 
ble men and fair women to hear him as that our elder 
brother. He is old in years, — he says, I don't say so, — 
but he is young in heart, — young enough to be the cham- 
pion of our America in the tilt with the morose conservatism 
of the Old World, not only defending his cause, but carry- 
ing the war, I will not say into the enemy's country, but 
into the foreign land. We like him ; we like the progres- 
sive element, we like the conservative element ; and the 
glory of our Harvard should be that it is generous to all. 
The poorest of all bigotries is that which quarrels not only 
with different types of opinion, but different types of char- 
acter. God has made some men in the conservative mould, 
— more cautious, more attached to institutions, more ra- 
tional, more real, and others more given to abstractions, 



132 

more hopeful, more radical, — just as in the prismatic tints 
he has made one ray to differ from another. Now let the 
sons of Harvard be generous ; let not the yellow quarrel 
with the red ; let not the blue quarrel with the green ; but 
let all stand together, and shine together, one bright and 
blessed light upon the darkness of the unlettered world. 
" Mr. President, I give you as a sentiment : — 
" The good fellowship of the sons of Harvard, — not only 
without a break, but without ajar." 

Dr. Holmes gave : — 

" Among those who have sat in the chair of our beloved 
University is one whose eloquent tones have delighted more 
listeners than those of any living speaker of his time and 
nation. What echoes have not grown musical in repeating 
his accents. Shall we call upon him, then, as an orator? 
But literature will insist on claiming him as a scholar. 
Shall we call upon him as a scholar ? But the State will 
say he belongs to her as a Senator, or an imperial envoy, 
or in some other exalted capacity. Shall we drop all these 
claims and call upon him as an honored private citizen ? 
But the columns of the political newspapers and the elec- 
tion placards deny him that blissful obscurity. There is 
nothing to be done but to leave him his choice of titles, and 
to name him simply as the Honorable Edward Everett." 

Music, " Stride la Vampa." 

Mr. Everett was received with loud and prolonged ap- 
plause. When silence was restored, he spoke as follows : — 

" The only title by which I wish to be known on the 
present occasion is that of a dutiful, affectionate, and grate- 
ful son of Harvard. With respect to the eloquent descrip- 
tion just given by my valued friend, the Orator of the Day, 
of the value of prose speech, I regret that his practice was 



133 

not more in accordance with his doctrine ; he would not 
else, as he candidly admits, have robbed us of that half- 
hour of his own glowing and impressive prose, to which we 
should all have listened with so much pleasure. His Ex- 
cellency the Governor, who has addressed us with so much 
power and feeling, alluded, in pathetic terms, to the emo- 
tions with which he had, in his youth, listened to the cheer- 
ful strains which, on public occasions, were sometimes 
heard from the academic shades, and his regret that it had 
not then fallen to his lot to join the joyous circle. I could 
not listen to those touching remarks, and reflect on the 
efficient services which he has rendered to our ancient 
University, in promoting the endowment of the Museum 
of Natural History, without repeating the beautiful in- 
scription on the bust of Moliere, in the French Academy, 
' Nothing is wanting to his glory, — he is wanting to ours.' 
" I suppose, Sir, of all the titles to which you have been 
good enough to allude, that of an ex-President of the Uni- 
versity is the one by which I may with the greatest propri- 
ety address you, as most assuredly there is nothing in my 
humble career that I pride myself upon more, than that I 
was thought not unworthy to be placed at its head. I 
stood in that relation but a short time, but I sometimes 
return to these classic precincts with somewhat of the feel- 
ings of the retired tallow-chandler, of whom the well-known 
story is told. Having relinquished the partnership, he was 
desirous, after a while, of resuming it. This, however, 
could not be, and he then begged to be permitted, at least, 
to come and lend a hand on melting clays. Now, Sir, this 
is a melting day in more than one sense. "We have had 
two of the great natural solvents powerfully at work ever 
since sunrise, but I have not lately enjoyed a happier day. 
I suppose that the spectacle of four ex-Presidents of an 
institution like this, assembled on the same stage to assist 
at the inauguration of their successor, was never witnessed 



134 

before. It reminds rne of a little occurrence (His Excel- 
lency kindly permits us to indulge in a jest) on the day of 
my graduation. A young Chinese tradesman was invited 
to one of the Commencement entertainments, and, knowing 
our language but imperfectly, was a good deal pestered 
with questions about the institutions of his own country ; 
among others, whether there were any colleges in Canton. 
He probably thought that college was the general name of 
all corporations, for whatever object, (as indeed it is in 
Latin,) and answered that there were two colleges, each of 
which had four Presidents, and no students, — an arrange- 
ment which would lighten the burden of administering the 
discipline of the institutions, rather more than it would 
promote the cause of education. 

" I cannot, however, Sir, (to pass to a more serious 
strain,) speak on behalf of the ex-Presidents without feel- 
ing to what disadvantage I do it. If you, on entering 
upon the duties of the chair, thought it necessary to apolo- 
gize for taking the place of the distinguished President and 
first Vice-President of the Association, (men worthy in all 
respects of the praises bestowed by you upon them, but 
with whom no other person would think you were yourself 
unequally matched,) how can I but feel oppressed, in 
speaking for him, the Nestor of ex-Presidents and Alumni, 
who stands alone, by so many titles, in our respect and 
affection, — whose presence, though but for an hour, has 
added so much to the dignity and interest of the day, and 
whose necessary withdrawal from its further excitements is 
so deeply felt by us all. 

" There is no one who can better congratulate our hon- 
ored friend, who now accedes to the chair, than we who 
have gone before him. We know the nature of the duties 
to be performed, — of the rewards to be hoped for in their 
conscientious discharge. When I reflect, that, since the 
resignation of President Quincy, our Alma Mater has sue- 



135 

cessively called three of us into her service, whose united 
terms have not equalled his, and has at length intrusted 
her interests to you, Sir, (President Felton,) whose vigor- 
ous constitution and locks unbleached by time afford a 
promise, if not of the fifty years to which you have play- 
fully alluded, yet certainly of a long, long period of service 
and usefulness, I am reminded of that most magnificent 
verse, in the oldest and greatest of poems, (scarcely less 
familiar to you, Sir, than your mother tongue,) the verse 
which describes the descent of Neptune from Samothrace 
to iEgse, while woods and mountains trembled beneath the 
immortal feet of the god : — 

Tpls fxkv ope^ar lav, to 8e rirparov tuero reKfiap. 
' Thrice he strode on his march, but the fourth time he came to the goal.' 

" Our new President enters upon his office certainly 
under the happiest auspices. As the Governor has ob- 
served, the unanimous choice of the academic boards called 
him to the place ; and that election has been ratified by 
the equally unanimous voice of the Alumni, and the hearty 
approval of the public. This, too, at a time when, un- 
der the skilful administration of our honored friend, Dr. 
Walker, the institution had reached a point of unexampled 
prosperity, and no thought of any but first-rate qualifica- 
tions in a successor would have been tolerated for a mo- 
ment. Not only had larger classes than ever before begun 
to resort to the institution, equalled only by that which has 
been entered this week, but the standard of scholarship in 
the classics, in other branches of polite literature, in the 
exact sciences, in mental philosophy, has become so much 
higher than when I was an undergraduate, that it hardly 
seems the same institution. Then, Sir, the professional 
and scientific schools, the collections, the apparatus, and 
the libraries, and the means of pursuing the most advanced 
studies in every department, make it a real Universitas 



136 

artium. In this prosperous condition we now commit it 
trustingly to your charge, and look for its steady progress ; 
and if I might venture a hint at what we elder brethren 
would recommend, it would be that our young friends, the 
undergraduates, would hit upon some way of working off 
the exuberant spirits of youth a little more generous and 
kindly toward the new-comer, — a little more thoughtful 
and considerate toward their true friends, the Faculty, — 
than those which (notwithstanding the general manliness 
of the student) still, to some extent, prevail. I say their 
' true friends,' for while I was connected with the Uni- 
versity, never did I see, on the part of the Faculty, the 
slightest indication of a harsh or vindictive feeling toward 
their charge. 

It is, lacking one year, two centuries and a quarter from 
the date of the institution, — no inconsiderable period in 
any country, and one which, in this country, goes back to 
the very cradle of the settlement. May we not take an 
honest pride in reflecting on the large number of distin- 
guished men, in Church and in State, who, during this 
period, have acknowledged this seat of learning as their 
nursing mother, — standing, as it did, alone in the British 
Colonies for two generations, and never in after times — 
no, never for an hour — filling a lower place among her 
sisters than that which she now fills ? Two centuries of 
time have elapsed, — centuries which have changed the 
aspect of the world at home and abroad, — which have 
wrought a succession of revolutions that have shaken the 
most ancient thrones to the foundation, during which the 
Colonies have passed through that " struggle for life," of 
which we now hear so much from the physiologists, into 
the condition of thirty-three independent States, and with 
nearly as many millions of people ; and our noble Harvard 
still maintains as honorable a rank among the sister institu- 
tions, numerous and reputable as they are, as at any former 
period of her history. 



137 

" But let us not forget that the sister institutions are not 
only numerous and highly respectable, but animated, many 
of them, by a generous spirit of emulation, well calculated 
to keep the older seminaries on the stretch. Among all 
the wonders of the great West, nothing struck me more 
than the ample provision made and making in every branch 
of education. The state of society does not yet call for 
Universities on the same scale as the oldest and best fur- 
nished in the Eastern States, but our brethren in the West 
are rapidly, if I may use the homely expression, treading 
on our heels. I had the pleasure three years ago of visit- 
ing a seminary in the interior of Michigan, — an Indian 
wilderness within the memory of man, — which, for the 
character of its chancellor and faculty, for its scientific col- 
lections, and its observatory, would have done no discredit 
to one of the oldest States, and the entire expense of the 
establishment defrayed by the Commonwealth. I assisted 
about the same time at the inauguration of a University at 
St. Louis, which for liberality of endowment, and, what is 
better, liberality of principle, bids fair to be a radiating 
centre of intelligence to that mighty valley of the Missis- 
sippi. The school funds of some of these new States 
approach the fabulous. That of Illinois exceeds four mil- 
lions of dollars. That of Texas exceeds two millions of 
dollars; while the separate counties, in that State, have 
landed endowments for common schools, amounting in the 
aggregate to over two millions of acres of land, and the 
University fund exceeds 220,000 acres. In the cities of 
Cincinnati and Chicago I saw schools, which, for the scale 
of expenditure and accommodation, are not exceeded in 
Boston. 

" We cannot contemplate these rising institutions with 

anything but delight ; from the walls of old Harvard we 

bid them God speed; they are in no small degree our 

intellectual offspring. These new republics are doing, in 

18 



138 

their infancy, what our fathers did in the infancy of Mas- 
sachusetts ; they arc furnishing us a common ground of 
intellectual sympathy between East and West, which you, 
Sir, I am sure, will rejoice to foster: — and Heaven grant 
that two centuries hence they may boast of their ancient 
and venerable Yales, and Harvards, and Dartmouths, and 
Columbias, and Princetons, and William and Marys, as 
we now boast of ours." 

The President. — "Without the Law, our civilization 
would soon become barbarism ; without Judges, our law- 
yers would never agree ; without a wise Chief, our Judges 
would never decide. Suffer me, then, to propose the 
health of the Honorable Lemuel Shaw : — 

' Chiefcst of Chiefs ; a brain without a flaw; 
If chaos touched it, it would turn to Law.' " 

Chief Justice Shaw rose, amid the cheers of the company, 
and said : — 

" Mr. Chairman, — You impose upon me a difficult task 
in requiring me without preparation to rise amidst this 
torrent of eloquence, in which it would greatly please me 
if I could participate ; but as I am sure I should only 
interfere with other parties, I shall not extend my speech 
over any considerable time. But, Sir, I never can feel 
unprepared when the Law and the Judicature of the coun- 
try are called in question, and called in question in such a 
stylo of approbation. Sir, in the name of the Jurispru- 
dence of the Commonwealth, in the name of those who are 
called upon to administer it, I heartily thank you, and the 
gentlemen who arc present, for the sentiments you have 
expressed, and the manner in which they have been re- 
ceived by this distinguished intellectual company. Mr. 
Chairman, it would be very easy, if I thought it necessary, 
on an occasion like this, to point out various modes in 



139 

which the jurisprudence of the country is indebted to its 
Universities. It would be a theme requiring considera- 
tion. Sir, what would be the condition of any country, of 
any government, of any system of government, that had 
not a judiciary department ? Would it not be a machine 
without its balance-wheel, a steam-engine with all its power 
on of popular force, and of legislative power, without 
means of control ? Sir, the judiciary is a necessary ingre- 
dient in every well-ordered government ; and it is to the 
University — no, Sir, to the Universities of this whole com- 
munity — that we are to be indebted for it. 

" Sir, I participate with all my heart in the sentiments 
which have been so frequently expressed to-day, that the 
great object of all this University training, of this higher 
department of education, is to make men fitted for all the 
departments of society, and not for any particular profes- 
sion. Up to a certain point, Sir, we are all trained in the 
same way, and to the same purpose, and I regard the culti- 
vation of learning as one of the means of extending that 
civilization, that refinement, that improvement, that ad- 
vanced society, that liberty protected by law, which is to 
pervade the whole United States. It brings us into contact 
with each other ; States meet States ; Universities meet 
Universities, — and there is a common brotherhood ex- 
tended throughout the whole of the educated part of the 
community. I look forward, therefore, Sir, to the cultiva- 
tion of learning, not merely as a means of advancing the 
church, or advancing the law, or of promoting any particular 
department of science, but of training men to fit them for 
every department ; and for that purpose we all travel along 
the same common road. I look to the cultivation of the law 
as one of the means of that general union which is to per- 
vade our States, and bind us together as one people. 

" Nearly all the States of this Union have derived their 
principles of jurisprudence from that great body of wise 



140 

laws and wise precedents called the Common Law ; and 
wherever it is studied, whether in Michigan or in Massa- 
chusetts, in Connecticut or any of the Western States, the 
basis is the same. I therefore, Sir, ask the attention of this 
educated body of men to the great importance of the Dane 
Law School, a department of this University. Here, Sir, 
young men are trained in those principles of common law 
which belong to all the States ; and therefore come here 
and gather up those principles, and, while they are doing it, 
may form associations and opinions which tend to produce 
a common feeling of brotherhood throughout the States. 
I therefore, Sir, while I ask your kind and affectionate 
regard to the general institutions of Alma Mater, ask your 
attention also to that particular department of it which 
now may be considered as the Law School. Sir, it is not 
without experience that I claim to make some remarks 
upon this subject. I have been conversant both with the 
University and with the administration of the law for a 
longer period than any person now in the community. 
Sixty years ago to-day, I received my primum g-radum, 
which many of you have received to-day. As student, 
practitioner, and judge, I have been conversant with the 
jurisprudence of Massachusetts ever since. I hope that it 
will be extended. And I can conceive that this institution, 
bringing together youth from all the States, is among the 
means of forging a bond of union among all the States, 
socially and politically ; and I will therefore, Sir, express it 
in a sentiment which I intended to read, without any re- 
marks : — 

" The Dane Law School of Harvard College, — Appar- 
ently a small battery, but conducted on principles of true 
science : may it extend the genial warmth as well as the 
gladsome light of jurisprudence to every part of our land ; 
and may it ever remain as one wire of that electric metal- 
lic cable, the aggregate strength of which shall bind to- 
gether all the United States." 



141 

The President. — "I am afraid that I shall have no re- 
sponse to the toast which I am about to read ; but I know 
you will be glad to hear it, and express your kind feelings 
to one who is absent : — 

" The distinguished Historian, once at the head of our 
University, — He has divided his time between the Father 
of his country and the Mother of his countrymen, the 
Alumni. We desire him to show his face to the present 
generation." 

Three cheers were given for President Sparks. 

The President. — "I am more fortunate in respect to 
the next sentiment which I shall announce : — 

" The late President of Harvard University, — Long a 
teacher in human and divine science, we may follow his 
footsteps by the light they have shed on both. Let us con- 
gratulate those who will be privileged still to listen to those 
expositions of sacred truth which come mended from his 
tongue. A long and happy afternoon and evening to the 
retiring President." 

Music, — " Di Quella Pera," by the Band. 

Dr. Walker, on rising, was received with the most en- 
thusiastic cheering and applause, which continued for some 
minutes. When at last the plaudits which greeted him 
subsided, he spoke as follows : — 

" The ex-Presidents are so unreasonably numerous that 
we have come to the conclusion to speak by our representa- 
tive. The company, therefore, will be pleased to consider 
that the speech which has been made by one of my distin- 
guished predecessors (Mr. Everett), was made for the ex- 
Presidents, — that, in short, with the exception of a few 
sentences, in which he seemed to forget himself, the speech 
was mine as much as his. It is too late in the afternoon, 



142 

and not precisely ' the thing,' to preach a sermon on one 
of the subjects which, I am happy to say, met with your 
favor. 

"There is also another reason, — they have been heard 
two or three times. I cannot sit down, however, without a 
word of encouragement to my friend who has taken the 
place I so recently held. 1 believe that there is a common 
impression that the office is an onerous and thankless one. 
But I believe no such thing. The public will expect from 
my friend his best, and he will give it, and I know from 
my own experience, that he will find it received with a 
kindness which will fill him with gratitude and wonder." 

Dr. Walker resumed his seat amid the same enthusiastic 
expressions of the respect and affection of the Alumni which 
welcomed him on rising. 

The President gave the next sentiment : — 

" The Senate of the United States, — And the distin- 
guished son of Harvard College, who carries the light of 
the lessons lie learned within these walls to illuminate the 
councils of the nation, — The Honorable Charles Sumner." 

Three cheers were given for Mr. Sumner. 

The Peesident. — " In spite of his thousand deprecating 
gestures, I am determined that you shall look upon the 
good-bumored face, if you do not hear the words, of 

" The Great Naturalist, — The man who has found per- 
petual youth among a community of fossils." 

Professor Agassiz was received with immense cheering as 
he rose. I [e spoke as follows : — 

" You know, Mr. Chairman, that the fossils have long 
ceased to speak or utter any sign of life ; and yet, when we 



143 

look upon them, they tell us the history of the beginning of 
that creation which concluded with the introduction of men 
upon earth. It is therefore well worth while that we should 
bring them together and try to understand their teaching ; 
and it is demanded to-day for this institution. Single- 
handed I began, bringing together here and there speci- 
mens, with very little means, which I could ill afford to 
spend in that way ; but the time came when I could make 
an appeal to the community in behalf of my cherished ob- 
jects of study, and friends and the State have within a year 
erected yonder Museum ; and if the community is as liberal 
in the future, I hope to see an institution second only to 
two institutions in the world ; even now it is number nine 
among the museums that exist. 

" And, Gentlemen, it has not been by begging, that I 
have obtained the means of doing this. It has not been re- 
quired of me that I should appeal personally to anybody ; 
but spontaneously every one understanding what the pro- 
gress of science required, — what the University required 
for the advancement of some of its branches, — has 
come forward and thrust these means into my hands. 
And though, to complete the plan that I have laid out, very 
large sums are required, I will not make myself a bore 
by begging anywhere. But I will avail myself of such 
an opportunity as this to tell you what is wanted to 
raise an institution, in less than ten years, equal to the 
British Museum and the Jardin des Plantes, in their cor- 
responding departments. Simply this : that you should 
give me annually one seventh of what you have given me 
to spend last year, and that you thus enable me to secure 
the labors of those devoted sons of science, who, consid- 
ering its advancement more than their own prosperity, 
have devoted all their lives to making collections, and are 
now on the border of the grave, and who look for a safe 
resting-place for their collections, from which they are 



144 

going to part. Let that Museum be the shelter where all 
these collections shall find a resting-place, and then in less 
than ten years we shall have one of the first three Museums 
that exist in the world." 

The President. — "I give you, 

" Our Sister Colleges, — One in aim with our own, one 
in heart, — would they were all in presence Avith us to-day. 
We must quote the national motto, ' E Pluribus Unum,' 
and take one for many, — the Rev. Dr. Stearns, President 
of Amherst College." 

Three cheers having been given for Amherst College, Dr. 
Stearns rose and said : — 

"Mr. President, — Having performed the duties assigned 
to me to-day, I supposed that I had escaped from your shots ; 
but as you have called upon me, I will take this opportu- 
nity to say one word out of respect and love to my old 
Alma Mater. I have formed new connections in one re- 
spect, but I cannot forget my old love. In connection with 
the very prayer which my mother taught me to repeat, I 
was instructed also to feel the charm which there ever is in 
the words ' Harvard College.' I was not only educated 
here myself, but here three of my brothers graduated, my 
father graduated, my maternal and paternal grandfathers, 
and, I believe, one of my ancestors in every generation 
from the settlement of the country down to the present 
time. I have a right to say, therefore, whatever my pres- 
ent connections and my present duties were, — I love old 
Harvard ; and I have a right to say that I love that large- 
hearted brother of the class of 1827 who has been inaugu- 
rated as President to-day. What he was in College, he has 
been ever since, and he will be in time to come. I predict 
for him an honorable administration, and the good-will of 
all the graduates in successive classes hereafter, if not even 
to-day. 



145 

" I wish to take this opportunity to thank my friends of 
Harvard College for the sympathy they have accorded me 
since my connection with Amherst. The President of to- 
day was one of the first persons whom I consulted as to the 
expediency of assuming the office of President of the Col- 
lege at Amherst. The President who has just retired was 
another whom I consulted ; and it was owing much to the 
cordiality with which they treated that subject, and the 
information they gave me, that I was induced to accept 
the position which I now occupy. Amherst College can- 
not compete in all respects with Harvard. It is probable 
she never will. She is a daughter of Harvard, of which 
the good old mother will not have reason to be entirely 
ashamed. She is very considerable of a College. We have 
nine large public edifices, besides the President's house. 
"We have as large classes as Old Harvard had when I grad- 
uated. We have cabinets which are acknowledged to be 
some of the best in the country. I will not go further in 
our praise, but if you will come up to Old Amherst, we will 
show you from our towers Mount Tom, and Holyoke, and 
the Pelham Hills, and Connecticut River, and as beautiful 
scenery as the eye of man was ever cast upon. 

" Some of my friends have said of me that I am apt 
sometimes to look through Cambridge spectacles. I have 
introduced an occasional innovation, and among the rest 
one which was somewhat criticised. It was the introduc- 
tion of the President's cap and gown, — which were never 
seen in Old Amherst before. I was warned against the 
questionableness of the act. I was told that I was ventur- 
ing, and I did not know but I was. I thought, however, 
that, if they said there was a fool's cap on my head, there 
should be grit enough under it to Avear it there. I wore 
it, Sir, and perhaps it was not altogether offensive to Old 
Amherst. 

" The day I entered upon my duties was very much like 
19 



146 

the present, — a hearty good rain all the morning. One of 
the patrons of the College, who had come from somewhere 
among the everlasting hills, remarked that he ' did not like 
the reign of this new President.' But, Sir, we have all 
learned that what begins in a storm is often followed by- 
glorious sunshine ; and I believe it may be in Harvard as it 
was in Amherst. 

" I meant to tell you how I came on with gown and cap. 
One of the venerable men, whom I love most sincerely, 
took me aside and said, very gravely : ' Dr. Stearns, I have 
heard of but one adverse criticism upon your administra- 
tion thus far.' I began to tremble in my shoes, for I did 
not know what I might have done. ' What is it ? ' said 
I. ' Why,' said he, ' that cap.' ' And what of the cap ? ' 
' Why,' said he, l it is an innovation.' ' And what objec- 
tion is made to the innovation ? ' ' Why,' said he, ' if I 
must tell you, the wearer of such a cap as that may be 
supposed to carry a little vanity under it.' ' Sir,' said I, 
' is that all ? ' ' Yes,' said he, ' it is all.' ' Sir,' said I, 
' you have lived long enough to know that every man must 
have some foible ; I agree with you that this is mine, — 
and I think, if you live to see the next Commencement, you 
will see it there again.' Now to think, Mr. President, — 
and I make this remark partly to myself and partly to the 
new President of our Alma Mater, — to think of vanity 
when a man first wears the Commencement or Presi- 
dential cap, — when he is full of academic cares, and his 
stomach is overloaded with the Commencement Latin, 
from which he fears that he shall not be relieved, unless it 
is by his own demise ! Be that as it may, the cap in Am- 
herst College has become an institution, and Young Am- 
herst, I believe, likes it very well. I will not detain you 
longer, except to say that, if you will come to Amherst, we 
will not show you all the glories of Harvard, but I think 
we will show you something in the daughter which will not 
make you ashamed that Old Harvard is her parent. 



147 

" I will give you, in conclusion, my best wishes for the 
administration of the new President, — my best wishes for 
the College ; may the administration be long and brilliant, 
and the career of the College be more and more glorious 
unto the end of time." 

The President gave : — 

" The Scholarship of the Country, — One of its best repu- 
tations has disguised himself as a lawyer, and made the 
profession believe him a very good one. We ask the Hon. 
George S. Hillard to unmask and show us the face of one 
of our own elegant and accomplished scholars." 

Three cheers were given for Mr. Hillard, but he having 
retired from the hall, no response was made to the toast. 

The following sentiment was given : — 

" The Pulpit of the Great City, — It takes a good head, 
a brave heart, and a stirring voice, to banish sleep from its 
cushioned seats. Our brother, Dr. Bellows, has them all, 
and we want to hear his voice among us." 

Dr. Bellows was received with cheers, and he spoke as 
follows : — 

" Mr. President, — . Having lately knocked down the 
Doctors of Medicine with seeming impunity, you now ven- 
ture to crack up the Doctors of Divinity ! I shall not ven- 
ture to speak for the American pulpit, Sir, nor for the 
contributions Harvard has made to its learning and power. 
But I shall take advantage of the moment your call allows 
me, to say a word about our Divinity School. The Law 
School and the Scientific School have had their advocates, 
and they have gained their causes with this audience. 
Will you not permit me to plead the cause of the theo- 
logical department of the University ? We have heard, Sir, 



148 

with pain, in our part of the country, that you are thinking 
of amputating that member of the University. Sir, we 
protest against so fatal a mutilation of the Body of Learn- 
ing. You will destroy the very right of this institution to 
the name of University, if you cut off so integral a portion 
as the department of Divinity, — one of the three great 
departments of the higher learning, as we have heard to- 
day. Nor, Sir, is it necessary to take this course to escape 
the suspicion of sectarianism. Rather enlarge than dimin- 
ish the theological culture of the University. Allow any 
denomination that will, to endow a theological professor- 
ship, and nominate an incumbent of its own choice, and 
give students the privilege of attending the lectures of such 
Doctors in Theology as they prefer, and you will enlarge 
the influence and popularity of the institution, without 
adopting the remedy worse than the disease, namely, 
putting out the right eye of the University to cure a squint. 
" But, Sir, my devotion to Harvard does not depend upon 
her good behavior, either in this or other respects. I 
have just given the greatest proof of my loyalty by bringing 
my only son away from the metropolis of the country — 
from the open portals of Columbia College, where, judging 
by the salaries, the Professors ought to be two or three 
times as distinguished as those of Harvard, and with a 
King for a President — to this my own Alma Mater. Nay, 
Sir, I have withstood a greater temptation, for a College 
dearer than any other to my pride and my hopes was draw- 
ing hard upon my heart, — Antioch College, — almost a 
child of this, the young Harvard of the West, — which has 
recently called a distinguished Alumnus of yours to her 
Presidency, a man whom the College honored itself yester- 
day by decorating with a Doctorate of Divinity. But, Sir, I 
withstood the College of my adopted home, and the Col- 
lege of my devoted anxieties and most earnest hopes, for 
the College of my own nurture. 



149 

Recently visiting that young "Western Harvard, I was 
intensely impressed with the responsibilities of all College 
Presidents. Listening to the twenty-eight orations of the 
graduates, I was reminded of the difficulty of the wine- 
tasters, one of whom detected iron and the other leather in 
the butt of sherry, into which, when decanted, an iron key 
with a leathern thong was found to have fallen. The ora- 
tions smacked nine parts of Horace Mann and one part of 
Thomas Hill, who had been hardly a year in the College. 
What can exceed the splendor of the opportunities, if it be 
not the grants of the responsibleness of officers at the head 
of institutions like this, when they are thus seen com- 
municating a flavor to all that flows from these public 
fountains ? 

" But, Sir, I have exhausted my privilege, and, as I have 
no sentiment to offer, I am fortunate in having found in 
the car this morning, making my way through the rain, a 
stanza which must have been dropped on the previous trip 
by some retired hatter, who had given expression to his 
feelings, in view of the dampness that threatened the 
inauguration : — 

" Though winds do blow and waters flow, 
And envious clouds may pelt on, 
Her sacred crown no floods can drown, 
While Harvard keeps her Felt-on." 

Dr. Holmes here read extracts of letters from the Presi- 
dent of the Alumni, of interest to the Association. Then 
the band played " Home, Sweet Home," and accompanied 
the chorus of " Auld Lang Syne," with which the festival 
closed. 



[W 



fk« 



{ l \MJ\ VUJV 



ADDRESSES 



AT THE INAUGURATION OF 



COKNELIUS CONWAY FELTON, LL.D., 



PRESIDENT OF HARVARD COLLEGE, 



THE FESTIVAL OF THE ALUMNI, 



THURSDAY, JULY 19, 1860. 




CAMBRIDGE: 
SEVER AND FRANCIS 

BOOKSELLERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 

1860. 



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